Page 199 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

196 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

functionaries, receive the highest emoluments, though their contribution to
the general economic welfare is of questionable value. At the bottom of the
financial scale is the mass of Persian, Baluchi, Omani and Yemeni labourers

who do the hardest work and receive the lowest pay. A labourer’s basic daily
wage in Abu Dhabi in the spring of 1976 was 23 dirhams (about £3). For a
six-day working week, therefore, he received lift dirhams, or about £18, which
came to something less than 600dirhams, or under £80, a month. To emphasize
- if emphasis is necessary - the meagreness of this payment, it might be pointed
out that, as an inducement to the native tribesmen to send their children to the

schools provided for them, the Abu Dhabi government paid parents the sum of
500 dirhams a month for every child who attended a secondary school, and the
children themselves received from the government a further too or zoodirhams
a month as pocket money.

The familiar argument put forward in defence of the exploitation of foreign
labour in the Gulf oil states is that the labourers earn far more than they would
in their own countries, and that it was the very impoverishment of their lives at
home that drove them to find work abroad. Hence the swarms of labourers who
beat on the doors of the oil states, clamouring to be admitted, and hence, too,
the large numbers of illegal immigrants who are willing to run all manner of

risks to enter by surreptitious means. There is enough truth in the argument to
accord it a hearing, though it is a sorry justification for some of the circum­
stances in which Uitlander labourers are recruited and made to work. Some of
the worst abuses arise from the muqaddam system, which has for a good two
centuries or more operated around the shores of the Red Sea and the Gulf.

Essentially it is a system of indentured labour. A muqaddam is a broker, a
contractor of labour who will for a fee engage to supply a given number of men
to work for a specified period of time or until the completion of a project. He is
paid both by the employer on aper capita basis and by the labourer he recruits.
A thriving business is done in the illegal sale of work permits. If a labourer
cannot afford the bribe required to obtain a permit at the start of his contract,

he may arrange to pay the bribe in instalments as he works; and the bribe is
invariably large enough to ensure that he works for a good length of time. As
the muqaddam usually operates hand in glove with the shipowners who trans­
port the labourers from the Indian sub-continent to the Red Sea and the Gul ,

there are further opportunities for profit in the advancing and repayment 0
passage money. For all practical purposes, the labourer never fully escap£"J1 e
clutches of the muqaddam throughout the length of his contract. Muqa cmis
are also given to squeezing the employer to whom they have contracte to
supply men. At one stage or another, usually a critical one, in the construcuon
of a project, a muqaddam will demand a higher fee for the continue pr°vis*

of labour, usually citing as an excuse some wholly imaginary prob em t a
arisen in the supply of labour from Pakistan, India or Persia. AH t0° c°ns“
of his own contractual obligations and the risk of financial Pena