Gulf employers routinely withhold migrant wages to manage liquidity or defraud workers

Evidence

By marching in the May heat through modern downtown Dubai, with its high-rise o≈ce buildings and five-star hotels (most of which were built by South Asian laborers), the workers were risking not only their jobs but also imprisonment and deportation since public demonstrations and strikes are illegal in the United Arab Emirates, as they are in most of the Gulf region. Finally, the company, perhaps embarrassed by the commotion or prodded by a government concerned about the emirate’s image as a friendly tourist economy, sent buses to transport the workers to the ministry. However, they were suspicious of where the buses would actually take them, since workers are often carted o√ to jails and into deportation cells, so they continued their demonstration on foot. When they reached the ministry, they were informed that the company had decided to pay them two months’ worth of wages immediately and the remaining two months’ worth that they were owed by the end of the month.∞≥ Illegally withholding wages from migrant workers is a common point of grievance among workers and a tactic exercised by employers throughout the Gulf to alleviate their own liquidity problems or, more nefariously, to defraud migrants of their labor. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 710

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes wage withholding as a systematic, named tactic (‘illegally withholding wages’) used instrumentally across the Gulf.
• XREF: connects to: Britain’s leaving certificates capped wages by blocking worker mobility. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 176