Tue 27 Mar 2007
It has been recently reported in The Times (UK) that workers on the luxury Palm Jumeirah, sister resort to the proposed Jumeirah Southlands Resort in Bermuda, are among the 10,000 construction workers crammed into a desert labour camp on the outskirts of Dubai. The report describes how labourers from Asia are lured to Dubai with promises of well-paid jobs. However, the abuse of basic human rights has been reported, including confiscation of passports, low and unpaid wages, mass deportations and poor health and safety procedures leading to injuries, suicides and deaths. In light of Bermuda’s recent commemoration of the Slave Trade Act and our calls to end modern day slavery, the partnership between local developers and the Jumeirah group must be looked at in a new light.
2 Responses to “Have you seen the Jumeirah Group’s true colours?”
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April 1st, 2007 at 11:15 pm
National Geographic’s January 2007 issue also raises some of the ill effects (social and environmental) that Palm Jumeirah has inflicted upon Dubai - on the environmental front, Dubai’s coastal ecosystem, including the disruption of nesting locations for hundreds of sea turtles.
Photo:
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0701/feature3/gallery8.html
Feature: http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0701/feature3/index.html
July 19th, 2007 at 11:15 am
In addition to the blatant disregard for the environment and for the basic human rights of imported laborers exhibited during the construction of their landfill “luxury residence islands”, Jumeirah’s other Dubai projects include a series of luxury apartment towers built along the shoreline that effectively cut off the majority of residents from this resource. They clearly do not care about local residents either. If the Southlands plans do not already make this obvious, this should be a warning to all Bermudians.
Further, this company has a reputation in Dubai for constructing projects to poor standards, making sure they get their money out of them, and them leaving them to fall apart. Not only are the existing natural resources utterly destroyed by Jumeirah’s development style, the promised economic gains frequently fall short of projections and there is sometimes little more than a mass of crumbling concrete left over. This approach may not be so devastating in the middle of the desert, where they can move on to the next patch of open space, but with Bermuda’s limited area we cannot afford to risk this sort of thing happening.