South Asian workers were brought in to deliberately by the US-Gulf ruling class to replace Arab working class people in the Gulf Co-operation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE). After all, these workers from south Asia are cheaper, more disposable, and easier to control.
Now those same workers are the main casualties of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Disenfranchised by design, they’re once again bearing the fallout of a capitalist empire that was never theirs.
South Asian workers dying in the gulf
Bangladeshi worker Saleh Ahmed died after being struck by debris after an Iranian missile attack in the UAE, it was reported last weekend:
‘My father was an expat in the UAE. An Iranian missile landed on him’
Read the full story https://t.co/GWP9y7c6Rm
— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 7, 2026
His son told Sky News that his father was delivering water in Ajman, the UAE when the aerial attack left him injured. He died ten minutes later at the scene.
Pakistani journalist Zia Ur Rehman said on X:
Migrant workers from poorer countries, including Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and the Philippines, who form the backbone of the UAE’s workforce are increasingly bearing the human cost of the US-Israel-Iran conflict. At least 2 Pakistani labourers are confirmed dead so far.
Migrant workers from poorer countries, including Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and the Philippines, who form the backbone of the UAE’s workforce are increasingly bearing the human cost of the US-Israel-Iran conflict. At least 2 Pakistani labourers are confirmed dead so far.
— Zia Ur Rehman (@zalmayzia) March 8, 2026
A pattern of exploitation
This is not the first time poor labour from Asia has suffered in the GCC. In 2024, a fire in Kuwait, which left fifty workers from South and Southeast Asia dead, showed the vulnerability of migrant workers in the GCC countries.
Migrant Exploitation in GCC: Reminders from the #Kuwait Tragedy
Despite some legal reforms, the majority of the construction labour force in the GCC remains vulnerable, often incurring significant debts and facing exploitation.
K.M. Seethi
https://t.co/9xwNVkO68X
— The Wire (@thewire_in) June 15, 2024
The Wire reported the fire was caused by an electrical short circuit, with flammable partitions and a locked rooftop door trapping workers in an overcrowded building violating safety rules. According to the BBC, Kuwait’s deputy prime minister blamed property owners’ greed for the tragedy, saying “they violate regulations and this is the result.”
Imperialism and class in the Arab World
Scholar Adam Hanieh has shown that the “racialised and gendered” characteristics of the working class population in the Gulf States favour workers who are temporary. Hanieh wrote:
…in the case of the Gulf Arab states, the pronounced shift away from Arab to Asian workers through the 1990s and 2000s was likewise conceived as a means of discouraging workers from forming bonds of cultural belonging, and was also organised through the spatial separation of these workers from local Gulf citizens.
He shows how an Indian worker in Dubai isn’t paid based on how much it costs to live in Dubai. They’re paid based on how much it costs to live in India.
This means Gulf employers extract maximum profit from the Asian labourer while bearing none of the true costs of reproducing that labour like education, healthcare, housing and childcare.
So in effect, India and other south Asian countries are subsidising the Gulf’s wealth, and the border ensures the worker can never demand more.
Gulf states complicit
Ali Kadri, also a scholar on West Asia, explains why.
Gulf rulers park their wealth in US dollars, not in their own societies. As Kadri writes:
the merchant class wealth is mostly held in dollars, so it becomes one with US-led capital in the dollar.
They have “little to lose from forfeiting its production base in the home economy.” These South Asian workers are treated as servile and disposable. Mustapha Qadri, director of human rights organisation Equiderm, explained:
There is a conscious choice made to get workers that are from relatively poor countries, who don’t get paid as much and have a lot less power in the social dynamic of these countries, to do this difficult work – because they’re less likely to complain or to demand protection.
The US guarantees the economic security of these Gulf states. As such, they never have to build functioning nations with real citizen workforces. This US-led set-up favours both. The Gulf ruling class gets cheap labour and US protection. The US gets obedient allies and recycled petrodollars.
And the workers? They exist in an exploitative structure that treats both their lives and deaths as an acceptable cost for the gross skyscrapers that make up the skylines of the richest Gulf states.
Vassalage confirmed.
Featured image via the Canary
By Nandita Lal
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