Abu Dhabi Development Project, With A Guggenheim Museum, Confronts Labor Protest

In the city of Abu Dhabi, an ambitious plan for a $27 billion development project that would include a culture center with a Guggenheim museum as its centerpiece has run into persistent labor problems. Strikes are not the issue. Rather it’s a PR and protest movement that calls attention to the status of millions of foreign workers in the Gulf region, including workers involved in this project, which is known as Saadiyat Island. It is projected to include luxury hotels and shopping, as well as a cultural center with not only a Guggenheim, but a maritime museum, a national museum, a “Louvre Abu Dhabi” designed by Jean Nouvel, and a campus of New York University. The project has been stalled, not on account of labor issues, but apparently for reasons related to the fact that the United Arab Emirates, like other Gulf states whose economy is almost entirely based on oil, is not as flush as it was when the plan took shape. A New Yorker feature traces the origin and development of both the project and the protest, the state of labor in the Gulf states, and why some in the Emirates bristle at the criticism this project has received. “My country is only forty-five years old,” says one Emirati intellectual, “and I’m trying to fight ISIS, develop a post-oil economy, foster a tolerant society by building museums and universities, and I’m getting criticized for labor issues? Give me a break.”