ninety-nine percent of the UAE’s private workforce consists of foreign nationals. Many of those who come to work in the service and construction industries are trapped in indentured servitude, having paid fees to recruiting agencies, visa issuers, and employers only to have their passports taken form them upon arrival. Labor law in the UAE prohibits some of these measures but its enforcement is non-existent. Embassies and consulates offer little or no support to these unrepresented laborers.
Just as the slave-labor class is valued for their productive labor, the professional working class is valued only for their expendable capital--if an ex-patriate goes bankrupt in the UAE, they are forced into prison until they can repay their debt. Thus, the UAE produces a new class of interned professionals, trapped in the country without hope of escape.
The slaves of the UAE demand freedom. Similar to the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad in the United States and the run-away societies of Zambos in Brazil’s sugar plantations, we propose a city that is an intervention into the existing socio-political calamity; a dynamic pathway that frees slaves from the concrete matrix of Dubai to the freedom of nomadic emancipation.
Sean McGuire | Michael Lawlor
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