The dark truth behind Dubai’s glitz: Our investigation reveals the insidious way workers are recruited to the city, the ‘Kafala’ trap that leaves them stranded… and the horrific reason so many are dying

Few destinations are synonymous with extreme wealth in the way that Dubai is.

Touch down in the United Arab Emirates’ shimmering steel-and-glass desert metropolis, and extravagance abounds in every direction.

Supercars – from ‘G-Wagons’ to Lamborghinis – cruise the city’s spaghetti freeways, while Michelin-starred restaurants, five-star hotels and couture shopping malls sit cheek-by-jowl in Dubai’s dining and entertainment complexes. 

Outwardly at least, such opulence is considered entirely normal. Scratch beneath Dubai’s lustrous surface, though, and there’s another, murkier, kind of normal that has evolved since the city’s tourist industry first ignited in earnest in the late 1990s: exploitation. 

Human rights charities say the millions of migrant workers who prop up tourism in this Middle Eastern playground face everyday perils, including inhumane and often dangerous conditions, debt bondage and racism.  

Workers from developing countries – including India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and African nations such as Cameroon and Nigeria – are sold a land of milk and honey, wooed to the Middle East with the promise of plentiful employment opportunities and the prospect of financially supporting families back home.  

Already worth billions, Dubai’s tourism industry continues to grow: in 2025, international visitor figures were at their highest ever, with some 17.5 million estimated to have holidayed in the UAE’s showiest city. 

Little wonder many might view a hospitality role for a major hotel brand an attractive proposition; the most populous city in the UAE is largely spotless, with petty crime lower than in many parts of the world and violent crime rare.

However, critics of the Emirati city, ruled by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, say many tourist industry migrant workers end up paying a terrifying price for trying to prosper. 

‘Dubai Depression’, or the ‘Dubai blues’, have become common terms among workers, sparked by round-the-clock hours, unsafe working conditions, substandard accommodation and zero community support – factors that can wreak havoc on mental and physical well-being. Migrant workers have a significantly higher risk of suicide than UAE residents.

Low wages trap those who move here. Dubai would be on its knees without its overseas workforce – about 90 per cent of UAE employees are migrant labourers – but a fraction of tourist spending trickles down to those who build the hotels or work in them, with salaries sometimes just a few hundred pounds a year.

One job published this month on recruitment site CatererGlobal.com advertises for a ‘front office associate’ at the five-star Taj Exotica Resort & Spa on The Palm Jumeirah, the city’s 560-hectare man-made archipelago that stretches out into the Persian Gulf.

The salary? The full-time role, which prefers candidates fluent in Russian and Arabic, pays between £522 and £745 annually – around £43 to £62 a month. 

Incentives are listed as six days off a month, free accommodation, transport and food, and an unspecified yearly bonus.

Another position, advertised via LinkedIn by global recruitment company Spastaff.com, is for a beauty therapist at a ‘luxury Dubai spa’. Two years’ minimum experience is required for a job that pays around £2,000 a year – or just under £170 a month.

There are more positive stories; a housekeeper working for US brand Marriott International in Dubai can expect around £675 a month, which is, according to the recruitment website Indeed, 48 per cent higher than the national average for such jobs.

One senior hostess at a Marriott International hotel described the brand as ‘a good company with great opportunities for career growth’, but said the staff accommodation she was allocated in Al Quoz, a district in the city’s west, was ‘far from supermarkets or any convenient facilities’.

The hostess added: ‘The working hours were very long; I regularly worked 12 to 13 hours a day, which was exhausting.’

Accommodation for migrant workers is generally cramped, too, with employees asked to share bedrooms with multiple strangers.

One Cameroonian worker, named Milli, who spent three years in Dubai before leaving for the US in 2024, told the business podcast Benrolins Blueprint he was shocked by the living conditions that greeted him when he arrived.

He said: ‘The room I was in, there was ten of us. It was mixed gender and things [sexual activity] started happening. My brother called the landlord and said “I want my brother out of that room”.’

Milli says he was lucky: his older sibling, who had lived in Dubai for several years, had local contacts, and was able to get him a role in Abu Dhabi where accommodation was better. 

Describing standard accommodation for migrants, he told the podcast: ‘You’re four to a room. You’re sleeping on your bed like a corpse. It’s dormitory beds, that’s what you sleep on.’

Uncomfortable living conditions are the least of many migrants’ worries, though – with plenty facing serious harm.

The Business and Human Rights Centre (BHRC), a charity that monitors the human rights impacts of more than 10,000 companies across some 180 countries, highlights the region as a flash point for ‘extremely severe abuses’.

Last year, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the political and economic alliance between Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, accounted for 10 per cent of allegations on human rights reported worldwide – disproportionate to the relative size of the region.

And after Saudi Arabia, the UAE was the country with the second-highest number of cases reported.

Catriona Fraser, a migrant workers researcher at the BHRC, told the Daily Mail a ‘severe culture of fear and intimidation’ is present across the entire tourism sector in the region, with two main areas particularly at risk.

The first is construction – labourers who work on new hotels and urban development – and the second is the service industry: porters, cleaners, waiters, reception personnel and other hotel staff.

She explains: ‘In construction, there’s a very high number of occupational health and safety violations. We see a high proportion of deaths in the GCC relative to other regions. That’s obviously the most severe human rights violation: the denial of the right to life.

‘We also see a significant number of cases of heat exposure: workers labouring in conditions above 50C without adequate breaks, without water, without shade.’

Promises about working conditions made before a migrant worker arrives can vary hugely when they start a job – with the recruitment process expensive and convoluted.

‘What we’re seeing in the hotel industry is contract substitution and workers arriving to conditions that are different to those promised,’ says Fraser. ‘They may think they’re going to work in one job and instead are given another.

‘You might have, for example, a sub-agent in the origin country, and then another recruitment agency in origin, and then another recruitment agency in destination, and then the employer or labour supplier who is actually employing that worker.’

Recruitment-fee charging is as dubious as it sounds, with workers frequently embroiled in debt bondage: where they can’t leave a job – or the country – because they’re still paying off fees owed to the recruitment agencies that secured them the role.

Dubai operates a ‘Kafala’ system, which means workers are ‘sponsored’ by an employer, and therefore bound to them. 

Often passports will be taken for extended periods and employees are left vulnerable to exploitation – because they have no one to complain to, and no way of leaving the country without documents.

Fraser explains: ‘There’s quite a complex recruitment chain, and costs are added at each step of the journey. Often, it’s thousands of pounds that workers are paying to agents, sub-agents, intermediaries for that job.’

Wage theft is common, too, she adds. ‘Workers are often not getting paid their salaries for months, which leaves them unable to afford food and basic amenities.’

Three years ago, a Nepalese father-of-three named Rakesh Kumar Yadav died in Dubai just three months after travelling thousands of miles from the village he lived in with his family to work as a hotel security guard.

His death certificate, according to the New York Times, stated the 40-year-old’s demise was attributable to ‘heart and breath failure’, and it took his devastated family five weeks to repatriate his body. He died in debt to the recruitment companies who had supposedly helped him find jobs abroad.

Many migrant workers have also reported the Kafala system fuels racism, suggesting a hierarchy based on an employee’s country of origin exists, with some African workers claiming they’re treated less favourably than those from South Asian countries.

‘Workers from India, from Nepal, from Eastern Africa, are provided with worse conditions than workers who are UAE nationals. Often workers will complain that different nationalities have better quality food than they do,’ says Fraser.

Posting on YouTube last year, Nigerian businesswoman Ann Iyonu warned others about moving to Dubai for work.

The entrepreneur, who has since relocated to the Netherlands, told her followers: ‘From my own personal experiences, and discrimination, I wouldn’t recommend the UAE for Africans. 

‘It’s so bad that some companies in the UAE will tell you that they cannot give you a job because you’re African – even if you’re very qualified.’

Iyonu says trying to find an apartment was ‘frustrating’ and ‘depressing’; she claims she was frequently told by landlords that they couldn’t rent accommodation to her because she was Nigerian, despite her offering to provide a police report clarifying she wasn’t a criminal and could pay a year’s rent upfront.

Dubai’s skyline already features almost every major global hotel brand. Surely they’re held accountable for the welfare of the employees cleaning their rooms and serving their breakfasts?

Responsibility shifts in the Gulf, says Fraser, because, despite brands offering employment, they’ll frequently work with a local partner – often a property owner in the region – to ‘look after’ migrant employees.

Accountability becomes fragmented, and when major brands have been challenged on human rights violations regarding migrant workers in Dubai, they will often say it’s not their problem.

‘The hotel brand can say they don’t have influence over working conditions and labour rights because they are not themselves the owner of the property [where migrant workers reside],’ says Fraser.

‘In reality, jobs are advertised on the brand’s website, the contracts for these workers have the brand’s logo. They’re wearing that logo.’

With Dubai’s ‘build it and they will come’ mantra, tourism figures are only heading in one direction.  

A dizzying array of projects are on the horizon, including Dubai Square, a 7.4 million square metre residential and retail complex; the floating Dubai Museum of Art (DUMA) and Burj Azizi, a 725-metre-high skyscraper that will become the world’s second-highest building when it opens towards the end of the decade. 

By 2050, the city will also be home to Al Maktoum International, set to be the world’s largest airport.

It remains to be seen whether conditions for many of the overseas nationals – lured by the razzle-dazzle of Dubai to bring Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s futuristic vision to life – will improve.