Several months into the conflict involving the US, Israel and Iran, the effects are showing up somewhere that official economic statements don’t always capture — in the daily lives of the migrant workers who keep Dubai running.
Reports from workers across multiple nationalities paint a consistent picture: hiring has slowed significantly, salaries have been cut or restructured, and businesses that were thriving before the regional security situation deteriorated are now operating at reduced capacity. UAE officials have characterised the impact as temporary, and there are genuine reasons for long-term optimism about Dubai’s economic resilience. But for the workers living through it right now, the situation feels anything but temporary.
Tourism and Aviation Slowdown Hits Employment
Dubai’s economic model is built on movement — tourists arriving, airlines filling seats, hotels hosting guests, restaurants serving visitors, retailers capturing tourist spend. When regional security concerns reduce that movement, the knock-on effects travel quickly through every sector that depends on it.
Reports indicate that hotels, restaurants, catering companies, retail outlets, transport operators and maintenance firms have all experienced reduced business activity over recent months. When revenues fall, companies respond in predictable ways — they stop hiring, they reduce hours, and some close operations entirely.
Indian Workers Among Those Feeling the Pressure
Indian nationals make up one of the largest expatriate communities in the UAE, and a significant proportion of them are primary earners supporting families at home through monthly remittances. For those workers, job loss isn’t just a personal setback — it’s a crisis that travels directly to households thousands of kilometres away.
One of the cases that has emerged from reporting on the situation involves Mujeeb Rahman, an Indian accountant whose employer — a catering company — shut down due to cash flow problems. He described a job market where many companies have simply stopped recruiting, making it very difficult to find a new position even for experienced professionals.
Domestic Workers Continue Searching for Employment
The domestic employment sector has been particularly hard hit. Joy Vivanda, a Filipina domestic worker, reportedly lost her job when the family she worked for left Dubai during the peak of the regional tensions and never came back.
She has spent months searching for new work — visiting neighbourhoods, checking notice boards, speaking to people directly. Returning home isn’t an option she has, because her earnings here are what her family depends on. Her situation is not unusual. Across Dubai, domestic workers who lost employers during the conflict are navigating a market where demand has contracted at exactly the moment supply has grown.
Hiring Activity Continues to Slow
The individual accounts are supported by broader data. A ManpowerGroup survey of 546 UAE employers found that one in four planned to reduce jobs during the third quarter of 2026, while nearly one-third had no hiring plans at all.
The sectors still recruiting tend to be those looking for specialised or technical professionals. The industries that have historically absorbed large numbers of migrant workers — hospitality, retail, food and beverage, maintenance — are among those pulling back most sharply on new hiring.
Workers Who Kept Their Jobs Are Earning Less
Holding onto a job doesn’t necessarily mean financial stability has been maintained. For workers in commission-based or incentive-heavy roles, reduced customer numbers translate directly into smaller pay packets even when employment status remains unchanged.
Zekra Elsa, an Egyptian saleswoman, described how declining tourist footfall led her employer to shift her from a fixed salary to a commission-based structure. Her daily earnings have reportedly dropped significantly — a change that affects her ability to cover living costs and send money home, even though she technically remains employed.
Construction and Maintenance Contracts Slow Down
Technical workers have experienced similar pressures through a different mechanism. Yanick Obi, a welder, described still showing up to work every day while having very little to actually do — because maintenance contracts have dried up and companies are deferring projects until conditions improve.
That kind of underemployment is harder to capture in statistics than outright job losses, but the financial effect on workers is comparable. Being at work but not generating income is its own form of crisis.
Families Back Home Also Feel the Impact
The economic consequences of this situation don’t stay in Dubai. Remittances from UAE-based workers support households, school fees, medical bills and everyday expenses for millions of families across India, the Philippines, Egypt and beyond. When those payments stop or shrink, the effect ripples outward immediately.
Venkat, an Indian hotel housekeeper, reportedly returned to India after losing his position earlier this year. He described his Dubai salary as the funding mechanism for his children’s education — making his ability to return to work in the UAE not just personally important but essential to his family’s future prospects.
UAE Government Announces Business Support
The UAE government has not been passive in response to the economic slowdown. Support measures worth more than $680 million have been announced to help businesses manage the pressure, and officials have consistently expressed confidence in the country’s underlying economic strength.
Economy and Tourism Minister Abdulla Bin Touq Al Marri has described the disruption as a temporary “glitch” — framing that reflects genuine confidence in Dubai’s structural resilience, even if it sits at some distance from the experience of workers currently without jobs or income.
Business Leaders Expect Recovery
The business community’s long-term outlook remains broadly positive. Dubai Investments CEO Khalid Jassim Mohamed bin Kalban has stated publicly that there is no evidence of companies or investors leaving the emirate because of the current situation — a signal that confidence in Dubai’s fundamentals remains intact.
Dubai has absorbed and recovered from significant disruptions before — the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, previous periods of regional tension. Each time, the combination of economic diversification, infrastructure investment and proactive government support has contributed to recovery. There is reasonable basis for expecting that pattern to repeat.
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Uncertainty Continues After Renewed Regional Tensions
A temporary ceasefire earlier in the year briefly lifted hopes of a faster-than-expected economic rebound. Those hopes were tempered when hostilities resumed, reintroducing the uncertainty that businesses and workers had hoped was behind them.
For the migrant workers at the centre of this story, the question isn’t really about long-term economic cycles — it’s about what happens between now and whenever those cycles turn. Rent is due monthly. Families need to eat. And the job market that’s supposed to provide the income for all of that is, right now, offering considerably less than it was a year ago.
Why the Situation Matters for India’s Workforce
The UAE’s Indian expatriate community is so large — and its financial ties to households across India so deep — that what happens in Dubai’s labour market is genuinely consequential for the Indian economy at a household level. A significant and sustained slowdown in UAE hiring doesn’t just affect the workers here; it affects the communities they support back home.
The sectors to watch as recovery indicators are the same ones that contracted most sharply — tourism, aviation, retail and hospitality. When those start hiring again at meaningful volumes, it will be the clearest signal that Dubai’s employment market for migrant workers is genuinely turning around. Until then, the wait continues for thousands of people who came to Dubai to build a better future and are now hoping the city they bet on finds its footing again.