News from the Special Exploitation Zone

Image via Wikipedia

Gurgaon in Haryana is presented as the shining India, a symbol of capitalist success promising a better life for everyone behind the gateway of development. At a first glance the office towers and shopping malls reflect this chimera and even the facades of the garment factories look like three star hotels. Behind the facade, behind the factory walls and in the side streets of the industrial areas thousands of workers keep the rat-race going, producing cars and scooters for the middle-classes which end up in the traffic jam on the new highway between Delhi and Gurgaon. Thousands of young proletarianised middle class people lose time, energy and academic aspirations on night-shifts in call centres, selling loan schemes to working-class people in the US or pre-paid electricity schemes to the poor in the UK. Next door, thousands of rural-migrant workers uprooted by the agrarian crisis stitch and sew for export, competing with their angry brothers and sisters in Bangladesh or Vietnam. And the rat-race will not stop; on the outskirts of Gurgaon, Asia’s biggest Special Economic Zone is in the making. The following newsletter documents some of the developments in and around this miserable boom region. [READ THE REST.]

Related Articles

• Indian workers at factory linked to Marks & Spencer say they were beaten (guardian.co.uk)
• 30 MLAs suspended in Haryana (thehindu.com)
• China’s ‘miracle’ Shenzhen marks 30 years (newsinfo.inquirer.net)

Dubai: in a playground of the super-rich, workers confront a bonded labour system

Migrant workers from many countries have build up Dubai from a petty sheikhdom to a futuristic city. Their protests have exposed the grim conditions behind the glistening mirage.

Under a blazing Arabian sun was built the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which opened in January 2010. It symbolises the extremely rapid capitalist development of this city-state in the United Arab Emirates, now famous for its artificial islands, skyscrapers and shopping malls, as a centre for business, tourism, luxury homes and extravagant consumption – and increasingly infamous for the atrocious conditions endured by the army of migrant workers who are there to build the place or provide services to residents and tourists. [READ THE REST.]

[Image source.]