Dubai, United Arab Emirates ? Asian workers angered by low salaries and mistreatment smashed cars and offices in a riot that interrupted construction Wednesday of what is meant to be the world’s tallest skyscraper – including a luxury hotel run by Giorgio Armani.

The violence, which caused an estimated $1 million damage, illustrated the growing unrest among foreign workers who are the linchpin of Dubai’s breathtaking building boom.

Some 2,500 workers on the Burj Dubai tower and surrounding housing developments chased and beat security officers Tuesday night, then broke into offices where they smashed computers and files, witnesses said. They said about two dozen cars and construction machines were wrecked.

When the laborers, who work for the Dubai-based firm Al Naboodah Laing O’Rourke, returned to the vast construction site Wednesday, they demanded better pay and employment conditions and refused to return to work. In a sympathy strike, thousands of laborers building a terminal at Dubai International Airport also lay down their tools.

“Everyone is angry here. No one will work,” said Khalid Farouk, 39, a laborer with Al Naboodah. Others said their leaders were asking for pay raises: skilled carpenters on the site earn $7.60 per day, with laborers getting $4 per day.

A billboard publicizing the emerging Burj Dubai tower and surrounding housing developments is seen in the shadows of the gray concrete tower, now 36 stories tall, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Construction at the site was interrupted Wednesday after Asian workers rioted over low pay and mistreatment.

The riot was a rare outbreak of violence, but it was not the first sign of discontent among the foreigners who form the overwhelming majority of private sector workers in most oil-rich Gulf countries. There have been strikes in recent months in Qatar and Oman. In April, Bangladeshis stormed their own embassy in Kuwait, protesting working conditions that human rights activists have denounced as “slave-like.”

Millions of foreign workers have flooded Gulf nations, outweighing the population of citizens in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. In Saudi Arabia, foreign workers make up about 21 percent of the population of more than 26 million, but labor unrest is rare in the tightly controlled country.

In the UAE, where some estimates say more than three-quarters of the population of around 5 million people are foreigners, migrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China and elsewhere have provided the low-wage muscle behind one of the world’s great building booms.

Dubai, one of seven emirates making up the country, hosts some 300,000 Asians working in the construction field alone, helping propel it from a primitive town of 20,000 five decades ago to a gridlocked metropolis of 1.5 million – only 12 percent of whom are citizens.