ASKING ‘OUCH’ QUESTIONS!

I’ve just got back from Dubai after attending the Institute of Travel and Tourism’s annual conference. The conference is attended by 400 senior directors and owners of mainly leisure travel companies and we always do our best to successfully mix business with pleasurable networking events.





The conference sessions are always thought provoking and one session found me asking a question that nearly ended up getting me in trouble. The session ‘Ask Ali’ was about promoting Dubai as a tourist destination and the audience were encouraged to ask any question they wanted. I decided to ask Ali’s views about why Dubai paid people according to their race in the hospitality industry and how this will cause trouble in the future. Ali found this question not surprisingly rather difficult to answer, but confirmed there were no plans to bring in any discrimination laws. I later found out that being a woman in a country where free speech was not encouraged, I was lucky to get away with asking such an ‘ouch question’.

However the fact remains that while Europe is bending over backwards to ensure there is no racial, sexual, religious, age, disability discrimination, there are still countries in the world – such as Dubai – that think it is absolutely ok to discriminate and they do so openly. In the hospitality industry, if you are a British national, you will receive the highest wage for a job. The same job is then salary downgraded depending on your nationality.. the next highest salary will be for European nationals, then Asian nationals and finally Indian nationalities. So a British person receives around four times more money than an Indian nationality for the SAME job.

I picked up the Gulf News Appointments supplement on board Emirates (fantastic service by the way). It makes revealing reading with adverts requiring ‘Female Arab Executive Assistant’ , ‘General Practitioner – female’, ‘Camp Boss – Arab preferred’, ‘Syrian/Lebanese Butcher’, ‘Contracts Assistant – must be 28-32 years.’ All these adverts would be illegal in Europe. Yet currently this situation appears to be tolerated by all. It would seem that the general justification view is that many people are just grateful to have a job and that their standard of living is far higher now than the very poor conditions where they used to live. However does this make it right? Won’t there be trouble in the future as nationalities uprise in protest?

We should always be tolerant of other countries views, customs and traditions, however I feel that just as Dubai is built on sand, so is their HR policies and there can only be trouble in the future. Let me know if you agree/ disagree!

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