WORLD CUP OF SHAME
Since 2010, when Qatar was awarded the right to host the FIFA World Cup 2022, the foreign labourer population in Qatar has swelled. Roughly 18,500 migrants are currently building World Cup stadiums, but tens of thousands more are employed on projects linked to the World Cup, including in construction, hospitality and security. For almost a decade the tiny country has been criticised by unions and rights groups for labour exploitation, dangerous conditions and deaths of workers building stadiums and infrastructure for the upcoming event.
In a report titled “Qatar World Cup of Shame” Amnesty International said that migrants from Bangladesh, India and Nepal working on the refurbishment of the showcase Khalifa Stadium and landscaping the surrounding gardens and sporting facilities known as the “Aspire Zone” are being exploited. Workers often live in cramped, dirty and unsafe accommodation. Some are being subjected to forced labour. The workers pay amounts ranging from US$500 to US$4,300 to unscrupulous recruitment agents in their home country. Many are in debt, which makes them scared to leave their jobs when they get to Qatar. They can’t change jobs, they can’t leave the country, they often wait up to 7 months to get paid and many are scared of venturing beyond the work site or their workers’ camp. If workers complain about their conditions or seek help, they are often intimidated and threatened by their employers.
“Migrant workers told us about the hardship they endured having worked without pay on Al Bayt Stadium for months on end. They are worried about their families, who rely on the money they send home from Qatar to pay school fees and medical bills,” said Steve Cockburn, Head of Economic and Social Justice at Amnesty International.
“This case is the latest damning illustration of how easy it still is to exploit workers in Qatar, even when they are building one of the crown jewels of the World Cup. For years we have been urging Qatar to reform the system but clearly change has not come fast enough.”
Meanwhile, FIFA has been under pressure for years to “put pressure” on Qatar about the treatment of migrant laborers building World Cup stadiums. Football’s world governing body has said that the World Cup had already played a significant role in improving labour rights in Qatar, but rights groups disagree.
“If, over the past 10 years, FIFA had held its World Cup partners to account, and used its clout to push Qatar to fully reform its systems, we wouldn’t be hearing the same tales of workers’ suffering with only two and half years until kick-off,” said Steve Cockburn.
In March, The Guardian reported that there had been 34 stadium worker deaths in the last six years. 31 of the deaths, including the nine who died last year, are classified as “non-work related”, a term the supreme committee uses to describe deaths that largely occur off the worksite, most of which are attributed to sudden and unexplained cardiac or respiratory failure. However, in October 2019, the Guardian revealed that Qatar rarely carries out post-mortems when a migrant worker dies, making it difficult to accurately determine the cause of death and establish if it was non-work related. The Guardian further found that Qatar’s extreme summer heat is likely to be a significant factor in many worker deaths.
STRUCTURAL RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
Last week the United Nations raised “serious concerns of structural racial discrimination against non-nationals” in Qatar, in a highly critical report presented to the UN human rights council. The report says that a “de facto caste system based on national origin” exists in Gulf nation, “according to which European, North American, Australian and Arab nationalities systematically enjoy greater human rights protections than South Asian and sub-Saharan African nationalities”.
The report reveals that low-wage workers continue to suffer severe discrimination and exploitation. Non-payment of wages, unsafe working conditions, racial profiling by the police and denial of access to some public spaces are among the catalogue of abuses.
While the report notes some “impressive reforms”, particularly by the committee organising the World Cup in Qatar, it says that “serious challenges remain”. The Qatar government cancelled a visit by the UN special rapporteur on slavery, scheduled for January, soon after the preliminary findings of the report were published
After coming under fire over the treatment of migrant workers in 2017, Qatar agreed with the ILO to undertake labour reforms, but workers’ rights activists have criticised the lack of progress with just two years to go before the World Cup kicks off, and there’s little clarity on when further reforms will be rolled out.
“Qatar has been promising to abolish kafala since at least 2014 and actually claimed to have done it in 2016,” said James Lynch, a director at Fair / Square Projects and an expert on migrant workers in the Gulf told The Guardian. “Qatar should have gripped this issue years ago, before most of the World Cup stadiums and infrastructure were built by workers bound by this exploitative system.”
Under Qatar's kafala system, employers must provide workers with residency permits to justify their legal presence in the country, and grant them permission if they wish to change jobs. Qatar announced plans to abolish the system again in October 2019, but it continues to be in effect.
CORONAVIRUS INCREASES SUFFERING
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to make its way through the tiny country, which now has more than 100,000 confirmed cases - making it the worst hit country in the Middle East after Iran - the migrant workers’ cramped living quarters, lack of proper sanitation, and nutritious food endangers an already highly vulnerable group of people. In addition, migrant workers lack of access to health care. According to a 2019 report titled “Improving Single Male Laborers’ Health in Qatar”, migrants faced “fundamental challenges in readily accessing healthcare services, including lack of health cards to access government subsidized health services and lack of effective geographical access to hospitals and medical centers.” The problems are compounded by language barriers and fear of punishment.
The majority of coronavirus cases in Qatar to date have been located in the Industrial Area, however, the true burden of disease among migrant workers is unknown as the government doesn’t give figures on what portion of the infected are migrant workers. Authorities moved fast to contain the spreading virus by locking down the country and isolating the entire industrial area where the labourers live. But there are limits: workers sleep in dormitories, sharing rooms with up to 10 people and sharing kitchens and bathrooms with dozens more. When they head to work on the construction sites, it is on overcrowded buses.
Many migrants are worried they will be deported if they test positive for COVID-19, so there is a fear that they will not report symptoms or go get tested, feeling compelled to work with the virus and risking their own health and that of others. It is easy to see why it is difficult for migrants to refuse to go to work in a country where employers have extreme control over its workers.
