dubai • Hundreds of Asian labourers working in Dubai have been deported after thousands downed tools and staged an illegal strike at the weekend over poor wages and working conditions.

The authorities in the UAE took the decision after several thousand manual workers occupied and reportedly vandalised a building before attacking police and vehicles with stones on Saturday. The government denounced the “barbaric behaviour” of the strikers and gave them an ultimatum to return to work or be deported without pay with their contracts cancelled and being forbidden to return.

“Hundreds of Asian workers involved in acts of vandalism have been expelled from the country after their work permits were cancelled,” media reports said, citing a top police official and adding they had been banned from coming back.

Such protests are rare in the UAE, where strike action is outlawed and workers are not allowed to form labour unions. The UAE has experienced a huge boom in its economy in recent years fuelled to a large degree by the growth of the construction sector, which employs hundreds of thousands of foreign workers. Predominantly from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the labourers travel thousands of miles to work in the Gulf so they can send money home to their families.

Responding to the demonstrations, a senior labour ministry official said the prime minister and deputy premier had put in place measures to help foreign workers. “But these strikers have crossed a red line that we cannot tolerate,” added the official, Humaid bin Deemas.

The expulsions were sparked by angry street protests at dawn on Saturday when around 4,000 workers took control of a building in Jebel Ali, the commercial heart of the southwest of Dubai, throwing stones and damaging around 18 cars. Several thousand other protesters from different building projects joined the demonstration and riot police were deployed to disperse them using water cannons. A police helicopter was mobilised and filmed the scene in an effort to identify the ringleaders.

According to officials cited by local media, the protesters were demanding a wage rise of between Dh600 and Dh1,000 a month, improved transport to construction sites and better housing. On Sunday the strike spread to three other zones in the capital, with the local press reporting 3,100 workers involved, but police moved in and returned the strikers to their accommodation blocks.

“The stoppages only constituted 0.4 per cent of the annual output of work on the projects,” said Deemas. “The strikes were not all motivated by legitimate requests,” he added. The government had already issued more than Dh400m in fines against firms for breaching workers’ contracts, “because we refuse to allow exploitation of foreign workers,” he added.