Page 210 - Aamir Rehman - Dubai & Co Global Strategies for Doing Business in the Gulf States-McGraw-Hill (2007)

192 Dubai & Co.

“I JUST WORK HERE”: TERMS OF
ENGAGEMENT FOR EXPATRIATE
WORKERS

There is an irony of sorts in the norms of expatriate worker engage-
ment in the GCC countries. Precisely because expatriate workers are
so crucial to the GCC economies, they are engaged—through
regulation and through the local management norms—at a distance
and treated very much as foreigners. In numerous ways, expatriate
workers are reminded time and again that the Gulf region is not
their home and, almost certainly, never will be. This approach is
quite striking and fundamentally different from how migrant work-
ers are typically engaged elsewhere, especially in the Western world.
Consider the life of an expatriate worker. He or she is
employed on a contract basis and could be sent home after a
couple of years if the employer chooses not to renew his or her
contract. If he is a low-wage worker, his family is not granted visas,
and therefore he sees his wife and children only a couple of times
each year (at best), and perhaps not at all for several years if he is
trying to maximize savings and remittances. If the expatriate is a
professional-grade worker, his or her family will be together but
quite likely only one of the spouses (usually the male) will have a
work visa, and the other will not be legally employable. The
children will most likely attend a school linked with the home
country’s system and attended by youngsters of the same cultural
or racial background: British children generally attend British
schools; Indians, Indian schools. Should the family have a child
born in a GCC country, the child will not be a national of that coun-
try. The child will inherit the parents’ nationality, even if the child
has never been to that country. One could live in the Gulf for
decades, working loyally for an employer, and be forced to leave
upon retirement to return to a country with which one is out of
touch. 5 Citizenship laws in the region make naturalization
practically impossible for most expatriate workers. 6
In many ways, the alienating fashion in which expatriate
workers are engaged seems unfair or even cruel. In private, busi-
ness and government leaders will acknowledge that the practices
have disturbing effects. The rationale for such policies is basic
protectionism: the local workforce, it is argued, was not in a