Having lived in the UAE for 15 years plus, I can agree and disagree with most of you. It is true that the country does not provide any protection for the Expats, but this is in reality intended..... We are in the UAE for convenience (not ours I assure you), we are not expected to feel at home nor are we expected to consider it home, we are simply visitors, hired hand and when we are done we leave, so they expect to take the best of us, and given that they know that we would be taking the money with us, they developped this scheme whereby we ended up spending everything there...... The UAE is one of the few GCC states which started learning from its mistakes, the local nationals, have been pushed to work and perform after the last economical downfall, and now the pressure will increase on the expats especially those that have companies and are not employed.
At the same time, learning the culture is crutial in order to survive (if you realy want to survive working for EK, EY, GF, QA........), Each So called Manager believes he is the BIG boss and therefore he is always right, however you can never find one of those big bosses when there is a problem or when you need him. The survive these places one needs to operate below the radar, and more importantly befriend the middle and junior management especially the assistants, these are the people which make it happen and not the managers/directors/chiefs.....