The global financial crisis of 2008 dealt a blow to thousands of Indian laborers. They were set to join hundreds of thousands of compatriots providing the workforce for a construction boom in Dubai. Then the world economy spasmed, the price of oil tanked and international finance dried up. Hundreds of construction projects across the United Arab Emirates stalled. And the workers were left stranded at home, work permits in hand.
Three years later, survey teams deployed across India to interview thousands of these workers, many who managed to get to jobs in the UAE just before the crisis hit and others who drew the short straw: Hired by the same construction company just a few months later, they never left India and had to settle for a local job.
Their lives took very different paths: Those who shipped out to the Gulf, researchers found, earned four times as much as those who stayed, a gain on par with the wage gap between a university-educated worker and an illiterate laborer in India.
