And all those holidaymakers in Dubai who have sampled the shopping festival, the mall with the indoor ski slope or zooming up in the lift of the world's tallest building should also know that all this was built through the same system of labour that is suddenly so appalling. My first job was offered to me by a Dubai newspaper in 1995, and in taking it I unwittingly became an anomaly: a white-skinned, Arabic-speaking man with a university degree employed on what was charmingly referred to as an ''Indian contract''. This meant that I had to surrender my passport in return for the ID card that proved I was a legal resident. Unlike most of my south Asian colleagues, my passport was British, which meant that it got neatly index-carded in a filing cabinet. I once visited an office where passports were heaped in a battered cardboard box under the manager's desk. Being young and single, I could only nod sympathetically when friends complained that these contracts did not entitle them to bring their wives and children to live with them until they reached a certain elusive pay threshold. I was too callow at first to grasp the isolation and anxiety that these men went through, but I understood soon enough. In a society with rigid social and racial strata, there were several rungs below our own, and one of the most awful was that occupied by construction workers.

In our minibus heading for work I would see them in the next lane, standing in groups of 20 or 30 in the back of a speeding flatbed truck. There was, I was told, a law that stipulated that they could not work when the mercury rose beyond a certain point. But my colleagues added with a grim smile that the official maximum temperature always managed to fall a degree or two below that limit. Sure enough, I would watch men in hardhats and rags work in the noonday sun near my apartment. I would call my father, in an aircraft hangar on the other side of the city, to be told that the thermometer beside him read in excess of 45 or sometimes even 50 degrees Celsius. One year, on the festival of Eid, a colleague with a friend in construction arranged for us to play cricket with a team of labourers. ''You'll see where they live,'' he told me. It was only after we had played them on a desert pitch kilometres out of town, and then broken bread with them, that I realised this was where they lived - in a row of gated stalls, sleeping on straw. I was two years into a three-year contract when my colleagues threw me a birthday party. My apartment being too small, a friend's nearby flat was the venue.

In the wee hours, I walked home with my gifts through silent streets, before suddenly coming upon three policemen on an old sofa. Each had a gun by his side. ''Where are you going?'' one barked. ''What is all this stuff?'' ''It is my birthday,'' I said. ''I am on my way home.'' ''Where is your ID?'' the officer said, clearly irritated. I felt relieved. My ID had my date of birth on it, which would prove I told the truth. ''What do you know?'' he said. ''It is his birthday.'' Then before I could smile or say a word, the barrel of his gun was inside the neck of my shirt. ''Better head home now,'' he said. You bet, I thought. Point me to a plane.

I had to buy myself out of my contract. That was just about manageable for me, but I shuddered to think of those on the rungs below - I had read again and again of workers who could not obtain their passports or wages, stories our newspaper could never run but which our reporters felt duty bound to bring in. Anyone who had even suggested forming a union to object to any of this would have been jailed or deported, to be replaced by another from the vast pool of Asian labour. The classified sections were full of faces whose services were no longer required, printed alongside their passport numbers. To be unemployed in Dubai was to be present illegally - these were obituaries for the socially dead. A few months after my birthday, I walked through the departure gate, and my managing director's assistant stood on tiptoe to hand me my passport over a wooden screen. I sat in the lounge picking at a label fixed to the back of it, and when I had finished I promised never to give up my passport again. I also vowed never to forget the dignity and decency of the Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Indian, Bangladeshi and Filipino men and women whose blood and toil builds the pleasure domes of the Gulf.

Maher Mughrabi is a foreign desk news editor for Fairfax Media.