Global General
Dubai downturn sends ripples throughout Arab world
(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-01-07 17:40
 |
Large Medium Small |
Swiss bank UBS predicts the city's large foreign population will have shrunk by 8 percent last year as workers from the Mideast, Europe and Asia lose jobs and leave. Saud Masud, the analyst who made that prediction, said that works out to some 120,000 fewer people in the city.
Egyptian bank EFG Hermes has estimated the population could plunge by more than double that amount.
Now the city-state is asking lenders to renegotiate the terms of a chunk of the at least $80 billion its state-backed companies owe.
As Arabs like Tamimi return to their impoverished homelands, they hit the reality that has long dominated the Middle East - chronic underemployment, low salaries and few prospects.
Yet the growth has not yet been enough to wipe out the poverty endemic in many Arab countries or conquer high levels of unemployment. Thus the need for workers to still go elsewhere for work.
Foreign workers who once counted on Dubai as a source of jobs have found few other alternatives. Other Gulf sheikdoms with more oil and gas - like Qatar or the Emirates capital Abu Dhabi - have continued hiring.
For now, though, no city in the region is able to generate the vast amount of jobs that Dubai did before the crash.
There is another factor at play, too.
Dubai, though Muslim, is a more liberal place than the rest of the Gulf — with thumping nightclubs, glitzy malls and look-the-other way authorities. Other countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are far more conservative, and impose much harsher restrictions on the lives of workers and their families.
Ramzi, a 28-year-old Lebanese who refused to give his full name to safeguard his job prospects, said he has found work in Saudi Arabia but is holding off to find something in Dubai — where he worked until losing a job working in a shopping mall nine months ago.
For most workers though, the choice comes down to money.
"There is no comparison between Syria and Dubai in terms of opportunities and salaries," said Alisar Hassan, 26, a Syrian studying journalism at Damascus University. She was an assistant director of a marketing company in Dubai that has since shut down, and has yet to find new work.
"My life has changed a lot" since leaving, she said. "There are no jobs and even if there are some, they are with little salaries."
Back in Amman, Tamimi's life is also far different from his days in Dubai, when he would spend time with his wife and daughter visiting parks and restaurants in the tony beachfront Jumeirah neighborhood.
He used to send nearly half of his income to family back in Jordan - money those extended relatives have not been able to make up.
Now, without a job, he spends his days watching the world pass by at a small convenience store owned by a friend, worrying what will happen to his uninsured family if anyone falls ill.
He has applied for jobs in Jordan and the Gulf, and made a trip back to Dubai to seek work, but nothing has come through yet. "I had a home there," he said, remembering. "My life there was just wonderful."
