If they want to expand so much, why are the working conditions sounding so undesirable?
Because they are left with corrupted managers who know that they will take the money and leave. Nobody will be held responsible so why should they care? System is too big, there is no individual responsibility anymore and managers are abusing this fact.
Nobody cares about the working conditions, people or the company. It's a cow to milk and leave her to die in the desert.
Emirates is a real face of humanity when nobody is watching and when there is no control of the law. People turn to be cruel, lying and greedy bastards then.
Slavery mentality and fear culture contribute a lot to this state of the company. People are told that they should be proud to work for EK and happy to have a job. I even had a manager who told us that we "begged to work for Emirates" and that we "have to ******* smile", otherwise "there are thousands waiting for our job".
Employees are held under some sort of emotional and psychological blackmail. Managers know that in this part of the world they can always find another poor soul to work more for less and to put up with abuse and bullying.
Never forget that this part of the world never went through human and labour rights evolution phase, so locals are not even aware of them, while this presents a good excuse for western managers to seat, do nothing and get huge salaries and benefits.
So, that connection between expansion and working conditions doesn't really apply on EK. Until someone forbids them to fly due to human and labour rights violations or nobody wants to fly with them anymore due to better quality of service in other ME carriers or something terrible happens due to negligence of safety rules and demotivation and fatigue of people responsible for safety. It will be too late then though.
Emirates Airline presents everything that went wrong in today's superficial, stupid, selfish and profit oriented capitalistic world. The problem with stupidity is that it always unconsciously destroys itself at the end.