Gulf Contracts

The week​ before I went to the Middle East, the company held a Global Town Hall. ‘Town Hall’ is the faux-folksy term used by modern multinationals for meetings at which senior management transmit information to the workforce. The presentation is delivered to a small live audience and simultaneously broadcast to thousands of others. They are heavily stage-managed affairs, and nearly all, like this one, involve four middle-aged, white, male executives up on a platform, balancing precariously on bar stools. The men were wearing open-necked shirts and too-tight blue suits, and it was evident that their desperate 5 a.m. Peloton sessions were failing to hold back the paunches acquired by entertaining clients. Senior company leaders sat in the front row looking as comfortable as apparatchiks at a show trial. The cameras cut to them from time to time, so they had to ensure that their smiles remained in place for sixty long minutes. A group of ambitious young professionals sat in the row behind them. These were the members of the ‘high-potential programme’, picked out soon after joining the company and expected to toe the party line at all times.

The execs on stage could count on these two groups to ask prearranged questions, laugh at anything that resembled humour and make sure that the ‘Mood Elevator’ stayed at the very top of the building throughout. But sitting behind these stalwarts were the less welcome types of employee who tend to turn up to Town Halls. One group was made up of members of the awkward squad, employees serving their notice period or nearing retirement who had unresolved beefs with the company. The other was made up of employees who have studied the company’s material on ‘purpose and values’ and its well-publicised stance on human rights, modern slavery and LGBTQI+ issues, and wanted to hear what the company had to say about them.

Even after Trump’s interventions on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, statements of purpose and values and declarations of allyship remain very important in the corporate world. Every big company spends a great deal of money drafting and promoting these exhortations to ethical perfection. The mining giant Anglo American states: ‘We believe in humanity and therefore show care and respect for all people.’ BP comes up with the old chestnut ‘Be kind,’ while BAE’s mission is ‘to provide a vital advantage to help our customers protect what really matters’. These don’t sound much like the products of comms departments situated at the heart of corporate behemoths with a duty to keep City analysts happy and to return maximum financial rewards to their shareholders.

The Town Hall progressed as planned. There was a PowerPoint presentation full of KPIs and a smattering of corporate banter. There were a few questions from the front two rows, slow full tosses that were smashed out of the ground. The execs relaxed and smiled at one another like a decrepit boy band. Then someone from way back in the room put up her hand.

‘Who are you?’ a particularly jovial and particularly ruthless exec from the platform asked, smiling.

‘I am _______ and I’m a representative of the ED&I network.’

The exec nodded, sensing a chance to mention that he had recently become an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Ally, for anyone who missed this news on his latest Leadership Blog. ‘Go ahead!’

‘How can you justify working with regimes in the Middle East whose suppression of human rights and whose use of modern slavery is so atrocious? How can you reconcile our values with what actually happens in these countries?’ The questioner had articulated the ugly tension that exists between the company as devout adherent of the current holy grails of the liberal West and its other role, as a machine that must constantly fill its coffers with cash no matter what. The company, along with all of its peers, is busy burying its snout in the trough of massive contracts currently on offer in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and Kuwait. In aerospace, engineering, technology, construction, health and defence, the rush is on to grab as many fat contracts as possible. Companies from these sectors, and others, are jumping into bed with regimes that operate outside the rule of law and with disregard for human rights and labour conditions. My company is conducting expensive charm offensives on sheikhs and emirs and committing to deliver vast projects to deadlines it knows it cannot meet.

Happily, the exec is well practised in managing the contradictions that lie at the heart of the modern corporation. He is fully aware that it is necessary to be complicit in the illiberalism of the Middle East in order to keep the company in the black. At the same time, he seems able to believe and can convincingly recite the mantra that the company will never compromise its purpose, will never knowingly participate in projects in which workers are mistreated, will never betray its gay employees for the sake of a contract.

‘No, no, no,’ he said in an aggressively friendly manner. ‘We would never compromise our values. The best way we can effect change is by participating in projects in these countries. We must be an example.’ The others on the podium rallied round.

‘We can only use our influence if we are present in the region.’

‘We must be sensitive to other cultures’ ways of working.’

‘We will never compromise our beliefs.’

‘Honestly speaking, it’s slavery.’ A few days after the Town Hall I was sitting across the desk from the company’s country manager for [a Gulf state]. The office had white walls and a dark wood cabinet containing a few heavy glass awards for projects completed and hours of accident-free work achieved. ‘Once you sign a contract, you are theirs,’ he said. He was describing the fraught relationship between Gulf clients and Western contractors. The country manager, a Muslim not from the Gulf, is the product of a renowned European school and a number of the best European universities. I had come to speak to him and others in the region after an increase in the number of calls to the company’s allegation-reporting hotline, which anyone can use, anonymously. The first allegation concerned the country manager himself: a complaint of favouritism had been made against him. According to the report, he would appoint only his fellow nationals to senior positions. The reporter claimed that the country manager and his team acted like a mafia. I raised the matter with him cautiously. He laughed.

‘You know who the biggest mafia is in this company? The British and the Americans. Look at how many of the really top jobs are held by them.’ He was right, of course. To disprove the anonymous allegation, he showed me the evidence of a full and fair recruitment process for each of the positions. ‘What can I do? If they are the only suitable ones to apply, they are the ones that are going to get the jobs. No one asks the CEO why he has appointed yet another American to his team.’

The country manager reflected on how much had changed since he first began working in the region. ‘You know in Saudi, MBS has liberalised in a number of areas, not just the economy. Women can drive, walk around, work. They are even thinking about allowing alcohol – in the land of the Prophet!’ He threw up his hands in mock horror. ‘But then again, have the fundamentals really changed?’ Mohammed bin Salman’s liberal reign, it will be recalled, began with the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi and the arrest and incarceration of hundreds of senior Saudis in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton without any due process.

In the Gulf, the concentration of business in the hands of those who also hold absolute political power causes severe hardship, especially for migrant workers, predominantly from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines – although countries in sub-Saharan Africa are now becoming useful sources of even cheaper labour. For all the talk of digitalisation and innovation, of working smarter and of sustainable solutions, these unskilled workers are the real engine of this rapid development. During the World Cup in Qatar the terrible conditions under which workers had built the football stadiums were widely publicised; the same conditions persist throughout the region as new mega-projects are delivered at breakneck speed. In the remote desert areas that have been marked for transformation into sustainable pleasure domes so wonderful that, when complete, the pain of their creation will be considered an irrelevance, migrant labourers are working without even the most basic health and safety protections or concern for their welfare. Incidents that would result in criminal convictions for companies and their leaders if they occurred in the US or Europe are merely talked about around the evening fires at the vast camps to which the migrant employees get bused at the end of a back-breaking day of work in the heat.

After​ an hour or so driving through the desert, we saw a large mosque set back from the road. ‘There used to be a village here,’ the driver told me. ‘It was demolished when the land was taken for the Project. They offer people double the price of their home to move. If you refuse first time, they offer you triple the price. If you refuse again, they force you out – physically – with no compensation at all.’ We were heading to one of the outlying accommodation camps for the Project. The driver was tired and short-tempered: he had collected me from the airport very early in the morning and, without asking, had driven me straight to Camp Number One, just a few minutes away. Camp Number One is for winners: VIPs and senior execs. It has leisure facilities, food outlets and neat rows of high-spec offices and housing. It is at the centre of a web of camps built to house the thousands of workers on the Project. The number of the camp to which you are allocated is a very visible indicator of how important you are. After a long argument at Camp Number One’s pleasant reception, it was established that I had been billeted in Camp 23. So the driver was now taking me to a distant satellite camp which, he disdainfully told me, was not even finished.

We turned down a dirt road and, as we came closer to the area by the mosque, I saw a patchwork of concrete rectangles dotted around it – the foundations of demolished houses and shops that are the only remaining evidence that a sizeable community used to live here. After a few bumpy minutes we reached Camp 23. There were no receptionists with clipboards and bottled water here. An unshaven guard in ill-fitting desert camouflage and beret lifted the barrier and we were in.

The camp was indeed still being built. There were no permanent structures. In the middle were two large mess tents, one for officers (A and B classification) and one for other ranks (C and D). The As and the Bs are almost all white professionals and the Cs and Ds are entirely Black and Brown manual labourers. The quality of one’s food and accommodation is determined by whether an A, B, C or D is printed on your pass. Category As (me included) get a spacious multi-room cabin to themselves, with en suite bathroom, satellite TV and kitchen. Mine looked out onto a small square full of plants and benches and was a few moments’ stroll from the mess tent. Category D accommodation is not even inside the secure perimeter of the camp. The Ds live in poor-quality multi-occupancy units stacked one on top of one another in the desert, with rickety external stairs to the upper storeys. They have to queue at a gate to be admitted to the mess hall at an allocated time and to return to their side of the fence when they’ve eaten.

The next day I was taken to a viewing point to look at a vast trench being dug in the sand. The wind was roaring. A continuous line of lorries was driving in from the horizon. Each truck went to the lip of the abyss, where it was filled with sand before driving off into the desert to dump its load and then returning to join the back of the queue and start the process all over again. The lorries came from across the Middle East and beyond. The Project has acted like a magnet for hauliers from many countries and the lorries come in all shapes and sizes, in all states of roadworthiness. The sand has to be moved from the hole and dumped. Where? Who knows. Who cares. The Project must be finished.

I then travelled to another office in another sprawling city. My driver explained the devastatingly unpredictable approach to urban expansion in this country. If a sheikh wills it, a derelict quarter of the city will become the focus of intense development, with no regard for planning considerations. Previously vibrant neighbourhoods are hollowed out as resources and facilities are transferred to the favoured new place. Companies like mine participate in this arbitrary construction cycle, and after completing the public works part of the project will sometimes build fancy villas for the men who awarded the contracts. All the work is appropriately contracted and paid for, but it adds to the sense of intense personalisation that is such a feature of doing business in the Gulf.

I had been asked to speak to one of our employees about an incident that had recently occurred in one of these luxury homes. The employee was the caretaker for the property of an important person and lived here alone, sending money back to his family in Punjab. One day, towards the end of his shift, an internal door handle broke and the owner told him to fix it immediately. The caretaker rang round all the usual suppliers but they didn’t have the right handle – it was an expensive European type and would take a few days to arrive. When he passed on the bad news, the owner was so angry that he took the man hostage. He made it clear that the employee would remain captive until the problem was fixed. The caretaker eventually raised the alarm and his line manager negotiated his release.

When I reported the incident at corporate headquarters, I was told that everyone understands the risks of working in the Gulf. There was no way we were going to upset an important client over such a trivial incident. At least the caretaker was physically unharmed. While working for another company, I had been present when a furious business owner slapped his Indian bookkeeper so hard that the man fell off his chair (he had messed up an accounting task). For fear of upsetting the man and being responsible for losing business in that country, my colleagues and I did nothing.

This arbitrary, personalised power can also be exercised in a different direction. I was told about a client of another company who was so happy with the job done by a team of workers that he wired them each a bonus worth five times their annual salary. A happy story, but the incident underlines the asymmetrical nature of labour relations in the area, where those without standing are subject to unpredictable extremes of behaviour.

On the last day of my trip, I spoke to an administrator for the office in _______. He had given years of exemplary service to the company and lived here with his family, sending his son to a decent school. This is a highly unusual level of domestic stability in a region where migrant workers can be fired at will and not having a job means that your visa is immediately revoked. Among his duties, the administrator was responsible for awarding low-level maintenance jobs. It was alleged that he had used a personal contact to do some office redecoration and been rewarded with a kickback. The amount involved was the equivalent of a few hundred pounds. Nevertheless, rules are rules, and the company takes such allegations very seriously. An investigation was carried out and it concluded that he had indeed taken a kickback.

When I met him, he explained that the company he had asked to do the work was not a specialist decorating company but a general store. ‘I told the investigators that in the Gulf all little firms do lots of jobs,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter what they are called, they will do a little job like this.’ He knew the owner well, as he knew everyone in the community here. The man owed him some money, and the supposed kickback was in fact simply repayment of the outstanding sum. But his explanation hadn’t persuaded the investigators, and he was immediately dismissed for gross misconduct. He would now have to leave the country. What he was really worried about was his son, who was a couple of terms away from taking the final school exams which would allow him to go to university here. ‘I cannot change the finding. But in light of my record with the company, can they wait for my son to finish high school before firing me?’ he asked me. When I got back to corporate headquarters, I spoke to the right people about the possibility of this small request for mercy being granted and the answer was clear. No.

Afew days​ later, the senior executive who had fielded the question at the Town Hall was chairing a meeting about the progress of the company’s projects in the Middle East. The meeting was running late as we turned to Item Four on the agenda: health and safety. ‘Anything on the list?’ he asked. There was. The manager responsible for health and safety told us about a death at a construction site in the desert unconnected with our company. A truck had run over a labourer from another company who had recently started on the site. The owner of the site had not provided any shelter from the sun for the workforce, so the labourer, who had received no safety training, decided to eat his lunch in the shade of a stationary truck. The truck driver came back from his own lunch break, climbed into the cab and drove off, squashing the man flat. Our health, safety and environment manager told us that the company which employed the labourer had decided not to record the incident as a work-related death, since strictly speaking the man wasn’t working at the time he was killed. There was some talk about how incidents like this could be avoided in the future. Then the senior executive looked at his watch. ‘I know that this is a death and everything, but we have to keep going through the agenda.’ We moved on to the next item.