You don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows, not if your eyes are open.

The Guardian reports that immigrant workers in Dubai have begun rioting and taking job action in retaliation for systematic abuse and coersion. http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1741686,00.html

[Frankly I hate this new linking system WordPress has put in, but what can I do?]

Unrest spreads among hundreds of thousands of migrant workers toiling on vast building projects.

Labourers, most from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, trapped into working here by crippling debts, sleep eight to a room and work long shifts for paltry wages and with no job security. They spend hours on bus trips to the sites each day, frequently go for months without pay, and are left penniless when contractors go bankrupt. For the first time, years of accumulated frustration and resentment have now boiled over into a series of strikes and demonstrations.

"I had big dreams when I came to Dubai," said Umprakash, 30, an Indian from Rajasthan, who has worked as a labourer here for a decade. "But we're in a miserable condition. I've forgotten all of my studies. Now I just use a hand shovel. This is no life for educated people," he said. "I wish I'd never heard of Dubai."

"There is no accountability and nobody questions the system because there are no political rights," said Mohammed al-Roken, a human rights lawyer and the former head of the Emirates' Jurists Association. "The elites are buying the allegiance of their citizens."

"There must be a change, otherwise this might explode in the face of society," he said.

This parallels what my mother told me from the mid-Eighties, when she was in Saudi Arabia. Back then, the workers were Bangladeshi and Korean, for some reason, and a significant number were not officially allowed to be in the country. Saudi Arabia is very pissy about who they let in and who they don't. Just try getting in there if your passport has a stamp from Israel; my mother paid the border guard fifty bucks not to stamp it when she went to Haifa.

So. Illegal immigrants, working and sending money back to their families. And the more illegal you are, the less you're paid; that's a given. Hell, we see it everywhere. Ask the last waiter who served you if he's ever heard of anything like that, and he'll probably go pale and ask if you're from immigration. So these workers, being not just illegal immigrants but also, particularly in the Koreans' case, unbelievers, were horribly abused and taken advantage of. They were paid a living wage, barely, but once the boss had no more use for them, they were let go without passage home. Even if they'd entered the country legally, they were thus rendered illegal, as their permits allowed them to stay only so long as they were employed. This left a substantial and growing under-underclass, a sub-basement of humanity, to roam the streets upon which it was illegal to be "homeless."

So they got creative.

Once, during the period my mother lived in Riyadh, it rained. It does that every few years there, and when it does, it doesn't hold back. Suddenly you realize just what force it was that created all those odd desert corrugations, as the water sluices over the land, carving away chunks of it, carrying off huge slabs of highway and, in this case, causing the wholly inadequate storm sewers of Riyadh to erupt in geysers of mud, rainwater, and worse.

Sitting in the back of the limousine which was the only way she was allowed to get to work, being an unmarried female, my mother looked out into the pelting rain and saw bodies, Korean bodies, floating in the swell, bumping up against the curbs, and, every now and then, being geysered out of the sewers by eight foot tall fountains of runoff.

Following in their wake were all their posessions. Stools, broken-down chairs, pots and pans. Books. Not very many of those. But everything they had was flushed out by that once-in-a-lifetime rain, brought up from the underground where they dwelt in the sewers, outlawed, run off, forgotten.

It took them days to clean up the city. No-one would touch the bodies of the unbelievers.