BY LES HORTON

The labour riots in Dubai are an early warning to the entire region, throughout which foreign workers, particularly Asians, are routinely abused.

As I write this, a Pakistani worker is languishing in a Bahrain police station, despite having filed a legitimate claim through the Labour Ministry against his employer, for allegedly failing to pay him.

Once again the response from the employer was to declare him a "runaway" and have him locked up - something the police have again obligingly done.

The man concerned is due to be deported today and that will be the matter dealt with - and once again an employer, helped by police, will have sidestepped the labour laws of Bahrain.

Labourers are employed in much larger numbers in Dubai than here, so the ripple of anger over their treatment has become a tidal wave far more quickly.

But it will happen here and eventually in all the Gulf countries, for the abuse is common to them all.

Dubai is racing against time to put up its glittering façade and so the demands on workers have been great - too much, in fact, for men paid around BD45 a month to toil under the sun.

There are a lot of young, unemployed Bahrainis who could perhaps take advantage of the many construction jobs on offer in Dubai and here at home, but they and their parents would no doubt be horrified at the thought.

Who can blame them? Only those from the crippling poverty of villages in rural India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka will work 20-storeys up without protection, or dig foundations for 12 hours a day, for little more than their boss's lunch money.

Set aside the wage issue, it seems that many jobless Bahrainis and their counterparts throughout the Gulf would rather stand back and let their region be built by foreigners, than pick up a shovel themselves.

As a result, there will always be a need for cheap foreign labour and those workers will always be abused, in a community that has little or no respect for them. But perhaps the riots in Dubai are a warning that even the desperate will only put up with so much.