“Slave Labour” is Building the Qatar World Cup

In Part 1 of this article, we reported on the Guardian’s revelations that at least 44 Nepalis and perhaps over 80 Indian citizens had already died while working on the construction sites for the Qatar World Cup in 2022..

That conditions for immigrant workers in Qatar are despicable and inhumane should not come as a shock to the world.

The Building and Wood Workers International (BWI) is the organisation that represents construction workers. It has now started a campaign to remove the World Cup from Qatar unless basic human rights are respected with its “Red Card for FIFA, No World Cup without Workers Rights” campaign.

Their website statement reads:

“The BWI welcomes the series of media exposés on the exploitative and scandalous situation of building workers in Brazil and Qatar.

The articles of the Guardian and BBC finally put light globally on the deplorable situation of the thousands of workers preparing the FIFA World Cups.“

Incidentally, the BWI are also less than happy about the situation in Russia which is hosting the 2018 World Cup.

Vasco Pedrina, Vice-President of BWI for Europe added to the website:

 “Modern-day slavery is the common theme that has described the preparations of at least three FIFA World Cups.

BWI has been campaigning for decent work in FIFA events and we conducted 26 strikes in South Africa and 25 strikes in Brazil to ensure fair wages and safe work conditions. This serial exploitation has to stop. It is time to raise the Red Card to FIFA.”

The movements General Secretary Ambet Yuson implored governments and football bodies to take more responsibility and not distance themselves from their organising committees.

“The global media revelations should now pressure FIFA towards stronger social responsibility for workers. Host governments and their contractors should be equally held to account on these exploitative work.”

A BWI delegation consisting of 18 trade unionists from 11 countries will be heading to Qatar on October 7 to meet with migrant workers and investigate the situation in the labour camps according to the website. It remains to be seen how the Qatari government will react to that visit.

They also picketed Thursday’s FIFA meeting in Zurich.

The United Nations’ own unit, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) warned that Qatar was flouting workers’ rights charters, charters it had already signed. Qatar became a signatory to the ILO convention on the abolition of forced labour in 2007.

Azfar Khan, the ILO’s senior labour migration adviser in the Arab states, told the Guardian that:

“The onus is on the Qataris if they have ratified the convention to better implement it. Many of the abuses that take place which can lead to forced labour are still happening.”

He’s being diplomatic.

While the number of deaths will rightly make the headlines, the Guardian reported that migrant workers in Qatar had been ‘denied access to free drinking water in extreme heat, had been unpaid for months and had had their passports confiscated to prevent them from leaving the country – in effect enslaving them.’

To put it another way, the Qatar World Cup is being built with slave labour.

Sharan Burrow is the general secretary of the ITUC and earlier met with the Qatari labour minister and officials of the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee in Geneva.

The Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee is the organising body for the World Cup.

She confirmed much of the evidence that the Guardian reported, telling the paper:

“Nothing of any substance is being done by the Qatar authorities on this issue. The evidence-based assessment of the mortality rate of migrant workers in Qatar shows that at least one worker on average per day is dying.

In the absence of real measures to tackle that and an increase in 50% of the migrant workforce, there will be a concomitant increase in deaths.”

She backed up the Guardian accounts of death and forced labour in Qatar.

“We are absolutely convinced they are dying because of conditions of work and life. Everything the Guardian has found out accords with the information we have gathered from visits to Qatar and Nepal.

There are harrowing testimonies from the workers in the system there. The 2022 World Cup is a very high profile event and should be implemented with the very highest standards and that is clearly not the case.”

She was quite prepared to use the ‘S’ word.

“FIFA needs to send a very strong and clear message to Qatar that it will not allow the World Cup to be delivered on the back of a system of modern slavery that is the reality for hundreds of thousands of migrant workers there today,” she told the Guardian.

Despite this level of working conditions being typical for Qatar, a spokesman for the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee had the good grace to act shocked when the Guardian confronted him with the evidence:

“Like everyone viewing the video and images, and reading the accompanying texts, we are appalled by the findings presented in the Guardian’s report. There is no excuse for any worker in Qatar, or anywhere else, to be treated in this manner.

The health, safety, wellbeing and dignity of every worker that contributes to staging the 2022 FIFA World Cup is of the utmost importance to our committee and we are committed to ensuring that the event serves as a catalyst toward creating sustainable improvements to the lives of all workers in Qatar.”

The Guardian is not falling for that for a minute.

It wrote in the September 25th article that  the allegations ‘suggest a chain of exploitation leading from poor Nepalese villages to Qatari leaders. The overall picture is of one of the richest nations exploiting one of the poorest to get ready for the world’s most popular sporting tournament.’

The procedure for ‘modern day slavery’ is depressingly familiar for those who have read stories about the abuse of domestic servants in London, sex workers across the world or migrant labour in factories.

The recruitment agents charge high amounts of money to secure native Nepalis jobs in Qatar.

These fees remain unpaid but are to be taken out of the salaries the workers are supposed to receive in Qatar. Therefore Nepali workers arrive there already in debt.

The obligation to repay these debts is imprisoning enough, but it is then combined with the failure to pay those wages, confiscation of travel documents and the consequent inability of workers to leave their place of work.

This constitutes forced labour defined as a form of modern-day slavery estimated to affect up to 21 million people across the globe.

Aidan McQuade is the director of Anti-Slavery International, which was founded in 1839. He confirmed the Guardian’s findings to them, going even further and calling the workers’ conditions ‘slavery’ as opposed to ‘modern day slavery’.

“The evidence uncovered by the Guardian is clear proof of the use of systematic forced labour in Qatar, McQuade said.

In fact, these working conditions and the astonishing number of deaths of vulnerable workers go beyond forced labour to the slavery of old where human beings were treated as objects. There is no longer a risk that the World Cup might be built on forced labour.

It is already happening.”

In the next piece we will be examining what football has had to say about the scandal. FIFPro, the international body for players, has already been outspoken.