Arabian dreams gone sour

Richard Henry’s sojourns in West Asia had always been jinxed. He went to Abu Dhabi in 1980 to work as a deckhand on a dredger, but returned four years later when the Emirate did some belt-tightening to cope with falling oil revenues.

He went to Dubai again in 2007 as an all-purpose labourer, but retuned a year later when fairy-tale constructions ground to a halt, banks went bankrupt, and governments braced to cope with an army of freshly unemployed expatriates.

Henry is among the thousands of Keralites — around 63,000, according to a survey undertaken by the Kerala government — who lost their overseas jobs to the global recession.  At 55, he is yet to pay back his creditors. He had paid Rs1.65 lakh to a labour supply contractor for the visa and travel documents.

As a labourer on the now-famed Palm Islands rising from the sea off Jebel Ali, he could barely save Rs20,000 a month to send back home. But that too stopped six months ago, when he was forced to fly back to his wife and school-going children at Shakthikulangara near Kollam.

“By December last year, there was no more work. But that did not stop the labour suppliers from importing around 80 people to our camp from Kerala. We all persisted because we had debts to meet back home. Our families were counting on us. But in May, I was forced to return,” says Henry, who today runs a small establishment that buys fish and prawns from trawlers at the harbour and sells them to processing companies.

Sea of difference
Shakthikulangara, which has the largest fishing harbour in Kerala, is a favourite haunt for trawlers from all over Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Even the natives’ boats rely on Tamil fishermen as local boys began to eye the paradise beyond the Arabian Sea.

The exodus, of course, had begun over a decade ago. Henry was among the earlier expatriates. Years of work on a trawler had made him an ideal candidate when he gave an interview for a seaman’s job on an English trawler in Doha, Qatar. Subsequently, he
had found employment on a dredger in Abu Dhabi.

“The food makes you diabetic and the toil makes you hernial (sic),” says Joseph Thomas, as he haggles with Henry over the price of the fish. Thomas was working as a foreman at the breakwater site surrounding the World, Dubai’s man-made archipelago (shaped like a world map) that offered the rich and famous a chance to buy realty resembling their favourite part of the globe. “I came back because I fell ill. I was bedridden for six months.
And once I recovered, I couldn’t return to Dubai as they had already replaced me,” he says. “But it wouldn’t have much of a difference, as I would have lost the job anyway due to the recession.”

Youngsters like John Britto, on the other hand, never got a chance to fall sick. At 30, all that this returned expatriate is left with is a debt of Rs1 lakh. “All of us paid Rs1.65 lakh to the contractor for visa and air tickets. We thought we could repay it all from our steady wages. People here were saying they earned Rs50,000 a month. But we soon realised we weren’t that lucky. First they cut our wages. Then the work stopped altogether,” says Britto, back to work in the harbour.

“We decided to go abroad because there was no steady income from work in the harbour. Sometimes, if the catch was good, you get money. If not, you have nothing,” he says. “But who would have thought Dubai would have a slowdown?” he asks, loading iced leatherjackets on to waiting trucks.

Trawling for men
Not everyone is in dire straits, though. The Gulf boom, and now the bust, has created an elite — the labour suppliers. These middlemen collect money from aspiring expatriates, process their travel documents, fly them into labour camps in West Asian cities, and take a cut from their hourly pay.

“I used to get 6.5 dirham an hour. We know that the company pays labour contractors more than double of that. Though the company pays for our food and accommodation too, the contractors deduct a sum every month from our meagre wages as ‘rent’ for the crammed rooms we stay in,” says Britto.

At the peak of the recession, Britto’s contractor was getting richer by 1.5 dirham an hour per labourer he shipped. “They suddenly cut my wage to 4 dirham. I was told it was the recession,” he says. Recession or not, agents make a killing.

Henry says ruthless agents mushroomed in the past decade. “When I went abroad for the first time, there was not a single agent around. I spotted a newspaper ad and went to Thiruvananthapuram for the interview. The British company hired me on a company visa. Now there are hundreds of agents all over the place,” he says.

“I was offered the job of a seaman,” recalls Henry. “When I landed in Dubai, they transported me to a diesel plant to clean it. When I protested, they said they will get me on board a dredger working at the Palm Islands. But there, I was forced to do construction work.”

When Henry tried to get the contractor to return his money, he discovered that they always kept one-third of the hired workers as a ‘reserve’: “The contractor never cared whether you had work. They just supplied to the companies the men they needed, and took a cut. But the reality is that if you didn’t have work, you couldn’t survive there — let alone sending money home.”

Supplying labour, it would appear, is a recession-proof industry. The ‘visa charge,’ though, has dropped marginally to Rs80,000.

“It didn’t matter whether or not everybody got work. As long as someone or the other was working, the contractors were guaranteed their cut. So they keep on recruiting and let the excess of hired hands fend for themselves,” says Henry. And it is these contractors who sent 1.42 lakh workers from Kerala to the Gulf right at the peak of the recession, from January to June this year.