In a report titled “Building Towers, Cheating Workers,” published last November, HRW catalogued a host of abusive practices including nonpayment of wages, squalid or dangerous working and living conditions, and the denial of proper medical care. It stated that in 2004 alone, more than 800 construction workers died out of an estimated 2.7 million—although the government claimed only 34 deaths that year. In comparison, the U.S. Department of Labor tracked 1,186 fatalities out of roughly 9 million workers in 2005.

Most laborers in the U.A.E. come from South Asian nations including Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka. Many find work by taking expensive loans, averaging $2,000 to $3,000, from recruiting agencies in their home countries—and then devote most of their wages to paying off these advances. Employers in Dubai often pay far less than promised, HRW alleges, and most hold workers’ passports for leverage. The average worker earns $175 per month.

Hadi Ghaemi, who authored the HRW report, says that exact statistics are almost impossible to find because the U.A.E. releases little data, but that the government’s own figures indicate more than 20,000 migrant workers have filed complaints about the nonpayment of wages and “labor camp” conditions. Workers have also staged riots. In March, at the site of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Burj Dubai (photos above), hundreds of frustrated laborers smashed cars and ransacked offices, causing an estimated $1 million in damages, according to The Associated Press.

Full article at Architectural Record.

This hotel is to be built in Dubai, alongside dozens of other major projects (Dark Roasted Blend has a good visual overview here and here).  I find the scale of the whole thing shocking, especially as shown in this picture, where the entire city skyline is a mass of cranes (Apparently, Dubai is using 1/4 of the world’s construction cranes).  How is this amount of development sustainable?  Are there really that many rich people in the world?  It strikes me that this must be the limit case of capitalism because it strains credulity that there could exist a more over the top demonstration of waste/greed/opulence/machismo.

Part of me wants the eschatological predictions of the Peak Oil crowd to be correct so that Dubai may become a vertical ghost town; a cautionary tale about evils of the religion of uninhibited growth.  It would feel like justice, or at least the stuff of William Gibson novels.

Anyway, assorted thoughts:

• Predictably, I join with my similarly draft-age comrades, Matt Zeitlin and Mike Meginnis in opposing the return of the draft that David Sirota endorses. Their take-downs are better than what I could write, but let me add: It’s extremely paternalistic to assume that more people would oppose the war if liberals made the policy choice more real for them. And let me suggest that this is exactly the kind of advocacy that gives liberals a bad name; feeding the sense that we know better. You create a shared military burden by providing real economic opportunities for poor folk so that they don’t have to rent out their bodies. Not by forcing rich people into a similarly shitty situation and hoping that maybe convinces them to be nice someday.
• MyDD has a post arguing that Florida is leaning Democrat at this point in the 2008 election. This is unfotunate, since it means Democratic candidates will feel the need to visit the state and pander to the Cuban expat community again. I’m tired of that group, the children of an exploitive aristocracy, determining our Cuba policy.
• Archidose presents the limit case of blog advertising. I’ve avoided advertising entirely at After Corbu, but I’ll admit that’s mostly because I can’t imagine it would be very lucrative. Plus I blog from a position of class privilege, which makes it easy to stay “pure.” I don’t begrudge the starving artist bloggers out there…but there is a reasonable limit to one’s crash commercialism.
• I saw someone quoting Priest Hardon and thought they were snarky, but apparently not. There is such a theologian. Now I feel like an irreverent asshole.
• The video at the GOOD Magazine Blog of a Tokyo wave pool packed with people is mesmerizing. Also alarming: how does no one drown?
• Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody is riding the Huck train. Right next to Ezra Klein! As much as I’d like to see it, I think the Republican’s will nominate a class warrior about the time the Democrats go for a Donald Trump. Though if the DLC has there way…
• Zoos are already creepy, and tigers being forced to nurse piglets is completely messed up.

The Jeely Piece Song

by Adam McNaughton

I’m a skyscraper wean, I live on the nineteenth flair,
On’ I’m gaun oot tae play ony mair,
For since we moved tae oor new house I’m wastin’ away,
‘Cos I’m gettin’ wan less meal ev’ry day,

Oh ye canny fling pieces oot a twenty-story flat,
Seven hundred hungry weans will testify tae that,
If it’s butter, cheese, or jeely, if breid is plain or pan,
The odds against it reachin’ us is ninety-nine tae wan,

We’ve wrote away tae Oxfam tae try an’ get some aid,
We’ve a’ joined thegither an’ formed a “piece” brigade,
We’re gonny march tae London tae demand oor Civil Rights,
Like “Nae mair hooses ower piece flingin’ heights.”

So, next time you think about building the world’s tallest building in your city: Think of the Children!

Also,the Affordable Housing Institute (from whence this picture comes) has a nice (if old) blog post on Reinventing Public Housing.

What frustrates me about the man’s work is that the individual instances of his architecture are often great. But he repeatably attempts to move beyond his natural scale and mold whole cities. These latter efforts are disasters.

The first such effort was the 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris. From Peter Hall’s Cities of Tomorrow (pg 222):

“Its 18 uniform 700-foot-high towers would have entailed the demolition of most of historic Paris north of the Seine save for a few monuments, some of which would be moved; the Place Vendome, which he liked as symbol of order, would be kept. He was apparently quite unable to understand why the plan aroused such an outcry in the city council, where he was called a barbarian.”

You do have to hand it to him. It takes serious chutzpah to suggest Paris should be leveled.

Then Hall quotes Corbusier himself:

“Statistics show us that business is conducted in the centre. This means that wide avenues must be driven through the centres of our towns. Therefore the existing centres must come down. To save itself, every great city must rebuild its center.”

This was the first time this kind of redevelopment to accommodate the car was suggested (and it would later happen in a great number of cities). Ignored is the deleterious effect this would have on the environment and the lived experience of the city.

Worse, the design explicitly assigned space to people based on their perceived social importance. More Hall:

“At the center were the skyscrapers of Plan Voisin which, Corbusier emphasized, were intended as offices for the elite cadres: industrialists, scientists, and artists (including, presumably, architects and planners);”

The lesser professions are on the periphery, ordered hierarchically. Each class has specific housing types intended for it, of decreasing size and quality as you become less important. Of course, these are the exact orderings that happen in cities normally, so it’s not like Le Corbusier is trashing our egalitarian society. However, it’s abhorrent to use state planning to reinforce social castes and divisions. In fact, that’s the opposite of what they teach you to do in planning school.

That said, it happens all the time. Corbu was inspiration to a lot of people.

*This is largely because an actual, honest-to-god architecture blog linked to me today, and thus I feel the need to up my built environment street cred. Lists of phallic buildings wasn’t going to cut it.

Merit Scholarships
It’s true that merit scholarships are problematic, but in defense of my (relatively privileged) class, they can be extremely helpful in situations where the government and one’s parents disagree about how privileged they are. I remember showing mine the “expected family contribution number” and getting laughs (justifiably, I’m not sure where they were supposed to get that much money).

As a student, you’re caught between your parents and your school’s financial aid department and, without leverage over either, are left to make the ends meet yourself. Which often means loans. Now, I don’t think policy should be written around the concerns of upper middle class folk, I’m just pointing out the problem with eliminating such scholarships. The fundamental problem here is that merit scholarships are not supposed to be the safety valve for kids who don’t get enough money from either their parents or the government. This is a tangent that has to do with how financial aid is awarded (discussed further down).

The problem with merit scholarships that Mike describes is basically moral hazard. Students get awarded scholarships based on high school performance, and it’s hard to lose once you have. (At the private school I attended, if you were below a 3.0 at the end of the year, you went on probation for a year. If, at the end of probation, you were still below 3.0, you lost your money.) Also, employers don’t pay that close attention to one’s GPA, and rarely request an official transcript in any case. This means that students don’t have very strong motivation to earn high grades in college. In fact, without a scholarship, they would be more motivated to earn high marks so that they could earn a scholarship for later years.

A better system would award scholarships based on performance. If your GPA is 2.0 say, you pay full price. At 4.0 (or 3.8 more reasonably), you pay nothing. In between, some straightforward linear interpolation can figure out your award. This is like a performance-based contract in sports. Of course, like in sports, the best students would want to be guaranteed a scholarship beforehand, and would avoid schools who wouldn’t do that.

Awarding Aid
Students shouldn’t be screwed because their parent’s can’t afford (or just won’t contribute) what their aid report says they must. Rather, if our country really thinks parents should pay X amount for their kids education, let’s not make it optional; incorporate it in the tax code. Paying $10,000 a year in school tuition is equivalent to being taxed 10k for education funding. Of course we don’t want to skyrocket the tax burden of the middle class, which shows why the “expected family contribution” is bunk. It’s way too high for many, many families. Better to just have all education paid for by a progressive income tax system. Oh for 70% bracket of the 70s!

Static Tuition
Once a student is admitted their tuition should not rise for at least four years. It’s tantamount to extortion (given the difficulties in transferring) for a school to raise its price once someone’s locked in.

Changing Schools
Colleges are not truly competitive. Yes, they ruthlessly go after high school seniors, wooing them with all the marketing skill they can muster, but then the romance stops; they know they have you. Transferring involves huge amounts of time — researching, applying, moving, and spending extra semesters in school to catch up (because there’s no way all your classes would transfer across usefully). Few students will do it.

So I’d like to see policy that made it easier to move between schools without aggravation or penalty, and possibly encourage some actual competition over quality of education, not just branding. This would remove the incentive schools have to spend on extremely visible signs of vigor (stadiums, health centers), and give the boring stuff like class availability, teacher quality, and low cost more value.

UPDATE: Corrected Mike’s name. I would have sworn his blog said “Matt,” but then, url’s don’t lie.