thatbuzzingnoise was my World Cup name. Maybe this topic is dead but I would still like to say and real life got in the way.
desertgirl: the wages set by foreign governments are recommendations and they are not enforceable in the UAE and indeed in any other country. The Filipino government recommends $200US as a minimum for its overseas workers for example. It is trying to prevent the abuses of its citizens.
Expanding the argument into what Indian Expats, Arabs, or Gulf States citizens may pay and do their workers does not benefit anyone's argument. What it highlights is that these governments have laws that are easily and widely abused.
As you say, because these men and women have taken difficult decisions and are making huge personal sacrifices for their families, they deserve the protection of fair employment laws. It should not be down to the whims of an employer on how they are treated.
I am not sure how to interpret your penultimate post because as I said, I don't want this to be about about specific experiences and it skirts a lot of wider issues which would not do them justice to simply skirt. I would like to address your last paragraph briefly however. Yes a lot of companies which are big international names are abusing the rights of workers in these states. This is why these states ought to have laws based on what the ILO recommends, at the very minimum. This is why there ought to be an international and political effort, driven by the voting public, to force these governments to put pressure on gulf states to improve their employment laws. Their situation is somewhat analogous to what happened in South Africa. Companies are amoral entities which only look toward profit and shareloaders' returns. It was not until the public pressured governments and multinationals that multinationals start to threaten the S. African government with pulling out and with threats of being treated as a Pariah state that the RSA gov't began to change peacefully rather than by further blood letting.