Livin' it up in the United Arab Emirates (such a lovely place)

Move over, Disney World. And, for that matter, the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, Taipei 101, sports stadiums, existing garish hotels, or any other man-made artifice that at one point made humanity marvel at its sheer ingenuity.

Within the next half-decade, a single city stands poised to conquer and dwarf every identifiable landmark on Earth - and in record time. Dubai, a city located in the heart of the United Arab Emirates, is quickly transforming into a boomtown for tourist attractions and breakneck development. Development which, according to a U.K. Sunday herald article, wouldn't happen without the thousands of foreign laborers toiling under massive skyscrapers in the blazing Persian Gulf sun.

Yes, amid all the construction cranes, a half-built theme park dubbed Dubailand, and a chain of unfinished luxury islands modeled after the entire world are South Asian, Pakistani and other migrant workers sweating in sweltering desert heat and earning little dinero in return. That's right: the average foreign construction worker earns about $1 an hour, according to an August New York Times article.

Of course, that's only counting the workers who actually get paid.

The Sunday Herald's description is bleak:

"The sprawling, heat-blistered labour camp of Sonapur is a squalid home very different to the air-conditioned luxury enjoyed by the British expatriates. Workers sleep eight to a room in ugly dormitory blocks festooned with washing hung out to dry, shuttled by fleets of battered buses past the Starbucks and bars to building sites ringed with barbed wire where they toil for 12 hours or more, six days a week."

Thankfully, the laborers slogging through some of the worst working conditions in the entire world comprise roughly 99 percent of the workforce, or 4. 5 million foreigners. The cost of catering to upper-crust Shiekhs, Americans and other far-flung businessmen pouring petroleum money into Dubai just became a little easier. That's because a couple-thousand workers walked off a few-dozen construction sites last year, leading the UAE Labor Ministry to fork over back wages and improve worker's camp conditions. But unfortunately, the NYT story claims that laborers have "no right to unionize and no chance at citizenship."

Should globalization really come at such a terrible price? There's nothing more disheartening (or ironic) than to see blatant exploitation of labor used to build vacation resorts and travel hotspots sure to attract the wealthiest families on the planet. If so, bigwig executives can surely expect such a furious bottom-rung militancy to continue.

In about ten years, when most FAU graduates have advanced to suburbs and median-income jobs, and the hot topic 'round the household is a debate between shuffling the kids off to the newly-opened Dubailand or boring ol' Disney World, would the parents remember the cheap foreign labor that took to create it? Would they remember all the blistered hands that fashioned a desert paradise?

Images Courtesy BusinessWeek, NY Times, Burj-Dubai