Some Chinese labourers say they are routinely assigned nine-hour workdays, seven days a week, a violation of UAE labour law.
Topic Workers' rights Dubai
Such a schedule is standard in China. In the Emirates, however, regulations stipulate that labourers can work a maximum of six days a week, for eight hours each day, plus a maximum of two hours a day of overtime, for which they would be compensated at a special rate.
"Chinese labourers all work seven days a week. This is the custom in China," said a manager at China State Construction Engineering Company, a leading state-owned enterprise and the largest Chinese construction company in the UAE. The company employs 4,500 workers in the UAE - a third of them Chinese. "They can take a day off or a sick day, but they will not get paid."
Indeed, for many workers on seven-day schedules, burnout comes quickly. "If we were at home we could have left our jobs, but here we cannot," said one labourer, who arrived in the UAE six months ago. "We don't know where to go to complain. We don't want to make Chinese people look bad." "In any case, the salaries in Dubai are high. So we just let it go," he said. "We will work for two years and go home."
