Labourers' salaries

I understood that the average "unskilled" general construction labourers earned about AED400-600 a month. That's UAE dirhams.

But a couple of the recent articles in the international papers have them much higher. The Washington Post describes two Bangladeshi construction labourers:

Amin is 24, Miah 19. Both look 14. Here for three years, Amin makes about $400 a month, Miah $245. Each paid an agent in Bangladesh more than $3,000 to secure a visa and work in Dubai, and both still owe a large share of that.

The Globe & Mail has a Kashmiri construction worker:

"Mr. Khan came to Abu Dhabi for the first time in 1997 and took a job as a digging-machine operator at $750 (U.S.) a month. According to a letter of reference the company gave him when he left in 1999, he was a "sincere and hard worker."

"He quit that job because another company, a small contractor called Abdul al-Kaseeri General Transport, offered him a job that paid about $1,200 monthly."

A thousand dollars a month is a staggeringly high salary here for non white-collar jobs (and even for many of them). Could it be that these newspapers are confusing dirhams with dollars? And if so, can you imagine their horror if they realised the workers were actually getting just over a quarter of the meagre wages cited?

Of course these figures may well be accurate, and perhaps these guys are all in semi-skilled positions.