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Dear diary,
Today I arrived in the poisoned air of Beijing. Despite news reports of the past week about worst ever pollution levels, it was the best conditions I've ever seen here, my third visit to the city in 4 years. Where visibility was at about 50m the first time I came in Autumn 2010, it was of the order of kilometres today. Beijing this time is a staging post for the tour of North Korea that I am doing with a friend. The flight with the country's national carrier Air Koryo is tomorrow. Fun fact, there was a rumor of direct flights with them between Kuwait and North Korea of which I was considering taking advantage. In the end though this trip became consecutive to a week I just did in Oman with another friend so taking one of the most irregular sounding airline routes in the world was not to be.
The 15 hour layover in Dubai between Muscat (Oman capital) and Beijing was the opposite of the boring grind that such an experience usually is. By coincidence another friend of mine was in Dubai at the time with his extended family, so I joined them and another friend of his who is running a business there. I'd met him before and it was nice to find out more details about how he became a successful businessman. It was the humble formula of joining his father's company but then varying its theme. I like talking with businesspeople because I have no experience doing this type of thing but it seems like a good way to become financially independent and is an interesting challenge. His company serves Dubai's booming construction sector and is partnered with a South Korean firm as a supplier for their goods.
His description of worker welfare on Dubai construction sites reminded me of stories about the UK industrial revolution. He described supplying a tool which creates a lot of dust when used. Due to this, workers were overexposed to dust and developed respiratory conditions after about 2 years. He said that simple measures like proper ventilation, using a better tool that produces less dust (he is able to supply this also but it is more expensive) or protective gear were not provided to workers by managers who rented his tools due to the cost. Another important issue is that if anyone complains, they can be fired and someone else will always be there to take their place. I remember learning about exactly the same situation in the weaving factories of the industrial revolution, leading to many injuries and early deaths.
The reason that workers back then and nowadays in Dubai and other Gulf states are in such huge supply is a significant prosperity gap. For example, many workers come to Kuwait from Bangladesh. The handy website http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/BD/KW reveals that Kuwaitis make 33x more money, live 17 years longer, have 84% less chance of dying in infancy and a 12% greater chance of employment. In the industrial revolution in the UK, the prosperity gap between peasants working on farms in the countryside and city dwellers was similar, creating a similar glut of available labour as many moved to the cities in search of opportunity, security and health.
The earlier observations about this businessperson's success but also the possibility that he has indirectly contributed to the much publicized problem of construction worker maltreatment in the region to me basically highlight the need for better regulation. He can supply a better tool but purchasors don't want it because it costs 4 times more. If its use were mandated, however, then this compromise on worker health wouldn't be made. Of course there are many factors explaining a lack of regulation but an obvious observation to make is that many of the workers are not of the same nationality as lawmakers. They are from considerably poorer countries with lower levels of education and power. These factors possibly mean that these individuals are not as completely humanized as individuals from lawmakers' own socioeconomic and national background. A person in some way dehumanized may not induce the same level of urgency regarding reform.
Last, the lawmakers from which such workers hail are often amongst the most corrupt in the world. That this problem occurs outside their political territory probably also reduces the incentive for them to do the right thing by this portion of the constituency. Continuing the Bangladesh example, they are ranked 133 out of 177 countries in the 2013 Corruption Perception Index. On a scale of 0 (corrupt) to 100 (clean) they score 23 (http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2013/results/#myAnchor1).
Another activity I filled my time with was skiing, of all things. The Mall of the Emirates has a 150m or so ski run in essentially a shed perched atop the mall. On the glacially slow chair lift the first time up I met a business analyst South African who was also on a long layover. He had been to Iraq six times helping a local telecoms company to better understand their customers. Given that Iraq is the last leg of the Axis of Evil Ski Tour it was good to meet someone who'd been there so often and survived. Dubai is certainly not the place one might expect to get a bit of practice in skiing but I felt after 2 hours on the slope that I'd gotten my eye in again after the first, December 2013, leg of the Tour in Iran.
Later in the evening before my flight to Beijing I was sitting in the beautifully appointed Boulevard Bus Tour bus going around the neighborhood of Dubai Mall and the Burj Khalifa. Here an uncommon sense of wonder was admitted by my hardened soul. Surrounded by the world's tallest skyscraper, a truly epic fountain at its foot shooting water as high as some fireworks and, further on during the tour, a string of perhaps 100 tents housing classic cars going on for a few hundred metres on both sides of the road, I realized these experiences were without, or with few, peer(s). I had the sense that Dubai is one of a handful of places that defines the world at the moment. Either their significant efforts to show off are working, or this is a true statement.
Another city which does not need to show off to achieve this same sense of touching the pulse of the modern world is Beijing. This is done in a tremendously different style than Dubai - where pork can be eaten in every single meal and the closest shop to our hotel entrance is a liquor store. Not, of course, that Beijing isn't known for showing off - who could forget the military exercise that was the 2008 Olympics and the more recent dazzle of the World Expo in another of China's most well known cities, Shanghai. Curiously enough, traveling through Dubai at the moment you will regularly see advertisements for the upcoming 2020 World Expo there! Seems like a fairly simple formula really, this world domination business.
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