Different country, though they’re close to each other. Part of the Saudi Arabian shoreline is in between, though I’ve seen on older maps that Qatar and UAE apparently once bordered each other.
As for the working conditions, I always suspected that cruise ships were this way (but I really have nothing to corroborate that).
Speaking of the Arabian Peninsula, I have an old Nat’l Geographic globe from the mid-1960s. UAE was then Trucial States. Oman was Muscat and Oman, and the globe depicts it as narrow shading along the coastline, rather than showing actual boundaries (perhaps to differentiate from Oman proper though the globe isn’t quite that old). Part of present-day Yemen was “South Arabia” and is similarly shown as existing only along the coastline.
