The emerging Gulf professional middle class is still struggling to both define itself within society and build a more secure economic standing. The combination of seeking social respect while also struggling with financial troubles make a strong set of challenges for any 30-year-old UAE national to wrestle with.
There have always been effective merchants and traders who usually operated out of family-based companies, but historically there was very little space for the professions to take root. In the smaller societies of the pre-1960s there were very few Gulf nationals who were lawyers, doctors and psychiatrists, and even the engineers (who were in high demand) came from abroad.
Even through the 1970s and 1980s, Gulf societies were small enough that they could still be run by personal connection, and family leaders would attend the majlis of the rulers and other leading citizens to air their concerns and seek answers to their problems. In this environment, there was much less room for the young professional to build an independent place in society because the system worked by personal connections rather than formal mechanisms.
The UAE has made a point of developing the legal and social structures that encourage such a professional class to emerge, which has also attracted young people from other Gulf states. The move to a more formal structure has taken decades of social growth, and the development of a legal framework for which the laws have to be written and then implemented before society starts to work with them. So, it is really only in the last 10 to 20 years that there has been a substantial number of trained nationals ready to start their own professional careers, and a legal environment in which they can operate.
Today, there are many young Gulf nationals who are educated and have trained in their particular professions. So, the countries have a growing cadre of skilled people who are both self-employed or in private sector employment, and others who are in government service. The independents include the lawyers, journalists, engineers and other more exotic professions like criminologists, motivators and sociologists, while government service includes the large number of officers in the armed services, the detectives in the police forces, and the bureaucrats who run the government machinery.
But while it is widely agreed that professionals, who will build the new Gulf middle classes are very important for their countries and their economies, they still do not have their own space in society. There are still very few role models of people who have established themselves as professionals. In addition to the leadership of the country, most of the UAE’s social heroes are businessmen supplemented by the occasional artist and social activist.
There is a real need for the mainstream professions to build up their cadre of role models, which can both give a profession better standing in society, and also encourage a young graduate to consider taking up the profession.
While some UAE lawyers and academics have built up a position in the country’s newspapers and TV stations, it is hard to think of a UAE architect who has the same standing as Sir Norman Forster or Zaha Hadid enjoy in Britain, or a philosopher who can pull in the crowds and write popular newspaper column like A.C. Grayling. Even if very few of us know detectives in our own lives, we all watch TV or read books, which make us share the excitement of that profession – so the UAE needs to develop its own fictional Inspector Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. With its well established support for women’s skills, it could also develop its own film heroes like the New York women detectives Cagney and Lacey.
But while the emerging professional class is still fighting for public recognition, it is also economically insecure. Many people were badly hit over the past few years by the effects of the recession on their financial standing, and many UAE small investors lost much of their savings in the collapse of local stock markets.
Commentators like Mohammad Al Asoumi have pointed out how hard the emerging Gulf middle class was hit by the financial crisis that started in 2009, attributing their hardship to both the fall in the value of real estate and the regional stock markets. Writing in Gulf News, he described how Gulf nationals lost between 70 and 90 per cent of their investments in the GCC markets after the prices of some companies fell by as much as 80 per cent from their IPO prices. For those who purchased their shares after IPOs, losses were almost double.
The government was aware of this and offered significant pay rises to its employees, which certainly compensated those from the middle class who work in the public sector, but the rest still had to endure the decline in their investment returns, which comprised a large percentage of their total annual income.
If the middle class is to take its proper place in Gulf society, it will take a few more years for their numbers to grow, their professional skills to become a celebrated part of society, and their financial security to be ensured through savings, investment and property.
