Sporting Values Built on Bloodied Sand: Qatar 2022
It’s hard to recall a sporting tournament that’s provided greater contrasts in outcome for those involved in its realisation than Fifa World Cup 2022, due to kick off this Sunday in Qatar. The imminent spectacle of conspicuous consumption, with its commitment to wealth generation greatly benefiting a small and already very rich minority, sits in sharp relief with the fates of thousands of working-class immigrants whose labours made the tournament possible in the first place.
Approximately 85% of Qatar’s 3 million inhabitants are migrant workers largely serving an oil-rich elite. Collective bargaining structures and meaningful legal representation are non-existent. Whilst joint committees exist, they cover only 2% of the workforce. Put simply, trade-union protection for those involved in the tournament’s vast construction projects remains non-existent. Fifa knew this would be the case when they closed the deal, and they know it now. That Sepp Blatter admits Qatar was a mistake (blaming Platini’s crucial block vote) is, to say the least, a bit late in the day. And in human terms, a mistake on a catastrophic scale.
The football itself, at times, feels like something of an irrelevance. Perhaps it ought to. Fifa, initially at least, talked much about ‘developing the game’ in the region. Surely as meaningless an example of corporate speak as was ever uttered. Netherlands manager, Louis Van Gaal, summed it up well:
“It’s ridiculous that we are going to play in a country … How does FIFA say it? To develop the football there. That is bullshit … It’s about money, commercial interests. That’s the main motive of FIFA.”
The cost of business
Football, at its highest levels of achievement, was once a sport that was also a business. With the dawn of Sky and satellite coverage, it became a business that was also a sport. Nasser Al Khatev, CEO of the tournament, estimates its total profits will be in the region of $17bn, with a projected audience of between three and four billion people. Football is now as much a global obsession as a business, but one whose impending incarnation has come at a heavy price: namely the often unexplained deaths of many hundreds of working people from some of the world’s poorest nations.
To be clear here, I won’t bother claiming moral superiority over those who’ll be cheering from their armchairs. Sporting spectacle provides respite from the general drudgery and insecurity working people are increasingly subject to. I’ll doubtlessly tune in. What I do claim, based on several years of personal experience, is an insight into the way things operate for immigrant workers in what I shall refer to as ‘the region’, a region united by language and oil, and, broadly speaking, an all-pervasive culture.
Since the tournament was awarded to Qatar in 2010, and work on the requisite infrastructure began, the roll-call of migrant workers’ deaths, compiled by the relevant embassies, read like those of a military disaster rather than a building enterprise:
- India 2,711
- Nepal 1,641
- Bangladesh 1,018
- Pakistan 824
These figures do not include deaths of Kenyan or Filipino nationals, or deaths occurring from the latter part of 2020 to the present day. It should also be noted that death records do not record occupation, or where the deceased was working.
Amongst the causes of death, the electrocutions, the multiple blunt injuries, the falls, the suicides, the causes undetermined due to decomposition, one cause dwarfs all others: those deaths deemed ‘natural’, mostly attributed to acute heart or repository failure. Fully 69% of deaths among Indian, Bangladeshi and Nepalese workers are recorded as such. Among Indians alone, the figure is 80%. Almost all are recorded without an autopsy. Heat is intense in the summer months, heat stress being the inevitable result. Merely being outside for prolonged periods requires considered management, let alone when performing physical labour.
The tournament’s organisational committee, whilst regretting the implications of the figures, maintain they are misleading. Further, they claim a policy of ‘transparency’ on the issue. For anyone with experience of the region’s workplace culture, claims of transparency, particularly on such a loaded issue, might reasonably be regarded as questionable.
The Qatari government insists that less than 10% of the deaths have occurred within the construction industry. Given the nature of construction work, the environment in which such work occurs, and the fact that since 2010, an international airport, a metro system, seven stadiums, about 100 hotels and an entire city have been built (all with connecting roads) the figure seems suspiciously, if not ridiculously low.
However you want to cut them, there’s something tragically wrong, pathetic even, in arguing numbers. Whether 6500 or 37 (a favourite figure with the organisers), the deaths amount to a lot of exploited, now dead, working-class people.
Extremes of exploitation
There is also, of course, the matter of football itself. Eric Cantona, who notably described workers’ treatment as horrible, summed up the feelings of many fans:
“I don’t really care about the next World Cup, which is not a real World Cup for me. In the last decades, you had a lot of events in countries that are emerging … But Qatar, it’s not a football country … There is nothing. It’s only about money …”
‘Supporting’ a team in the region is more a question of brand loyalty and media exposure than of genuine passion or civic pride. It’s generally possible to guess the team an individual ‘supports’ by the age that individual must have been when they first saw the Champions League trophy presented. Football, as it still is in much of Europe and South America, simply isn’t in the region’s DNA. It’s something exciting that happens on television. Whilst this isn’t a crime, it hardly provides sporting grounds for staging a world cup in an oil field.
It isn’t, of course, just the deaths that have been reprehensible. Despite FIFA repeatedly talking about football’s ‘core values’, a situation is allowed to exist where an ambassador for the host nation recently opined that homosexuality was the result of ‘damage in the mind’. Some welcome for members of the LGBTQ community.
Aside from such attitudes, and the (literally) industrial-scale death count, there remains (borrowing from now archaic VAR-speak) the ‘clear and obvious’ reality of issues related to workers’ pay and conditions. Non-transferrable work permits, ridiculously long hours, denial of rest days and arbitrary deductions are commonplace. To complain is to make things worse for yourself, as individual testimonies from Qatar have highlighted. Reports of the arrest and prolonged detainment of workers for ‘absconding’ have not been uncommon.
It’s also an open secret in the region that monies due to employees are often withheld by employers, and used instead for purposes of market speculation. I’ve had myself to wait months for wages, and I know people who’ve waited longer. I also know people who honoured contracts and never got paid at all.
Institutionally, an endemic problem lies in the absence of accountability within the systems in which workers are obliged to operate. To accept responsibility for injustices, whether the result of widespread bureaucratic incompetence or worse, of corrupt and exploitative practices, means losing face. An inadmissible concept to vast swathes of the management class. A concept more pressing than that of seeing justice done. And in the end, unless a man is ‘wasta’ (connected) there’s often nobody left for the worker to appeal to without recourse to the impenetrable and largely disinterested mechanisms of the law.
Seeking medical attention can also be problematic in the region, obviously more so if you do a job carrying a high risk of personal injury. There are no guarantees that promised insurance policies will be active. A foreign national known to me got mown down by a teenage driver. After three days he was ejected from the hospital, barely conscious, his employers had failed to maintain their payments. It transpired they’d diverted the required funds to a project they adjudged would provide a higher rate of return.
And the point here is this: I’m talking about the treatment of mostly privileged white-collar professionals, who are generally held in some esteem. Not working-class immigrants from poor counties, who mostly have it far worse. I’ve seen immigrant workers with broken bones, loitering in the carparks of clinics, begging passers-by to pay for their treatment. To summarise, you get charged the earth by agencies to get here, but once you arrive, you’re on your own.
Prioritising profit
Neither is there any sense of security when it comes to housing in Qatar. With the tournament less than three weeks away, a process of enforced gentrification began in the capital, Doha, with apartment blocks housing foreign workers (mainly Asians and Africans) being emptied in the areas earmarked for football tourists. A driver from Bangladesh, after living for fourteen years in the same neighbourhood, was given 48 hours to leave the villa he shared with 38 other people by the municipality; seemingly, a not untypical scenario:
“Who made the stadiums? Who made the roads? Who made everything? Bengalis, Pakistanis. People like us. Now they are making us all go outside.”
In May this year the Pay Up Fifa campaign, a coalition of human rights organisations, trade unions and fan groups, called upon Qatar and Fifa to set up a compensation fund for disenfranchised workers, and the families of the dead. Amnesty International, backed by a number of European football federations, suggested Fifa match the $440 million prize money shared between the 32 nations taking part in reparations. But according to Amnesty, despite limited advancements in Qatari labour laws, little tangible has been done.
“Thousands of workers remain stuck in the familiar cycle of exploitation and abuse thanks to legal loopholes and inadequate reinforcement …”
Meanwhile, Fifa has written to all 32 competing teams telling them to ‘focus on the football’ instead of handing out moral lessons.
“At Fifa, no one people or culture or nation is better than any other. This principle is the very foundation stone of mutual respect and non-discrimination. So, please let’s all remember that and let football take centre stage.”
Cliché will hardly be of practical use to the families of those that lost their lives. If Fifa had paid half the attention to health and safety protocols for workers off the field of play that they do for those on it, such corporate waffle may not have been so prevalent.
It seems the chief architect of the grim fiasco, Sepp Blatter, called it correctly in the end, when he admitted the tournament should never have been awarded to Qatar. The fact it was says very bad things indeed, not just about Fifa and its celebrity cheerleaders, but the sorry state of global capitalism as it stands, and the choices those with the least to lose were prepared to make for the sake of others’ profit margins.
Whilst the developed world reclines, sponsored beers to hand, in front of its plasma screens, VAR and stats, it would do well to bear in mind the most crucial of the numbers: those of the disenfranchised, and those of the dead.
(Courtesy: Counterfire, a British socialist organisation that also runs a website.)
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Migrant Workers, and the Qatar World Cup
Mouin Rabbani interviews Hiba Zayadin
[To a greater extent than previous tournaments, the FIFA World Cup to be held in Qatar during November-December 2022, has been mired in controversy. In addition to extensive reports of intrigue and corruption that generally accompany the selection of the host nation, the rights and treatment of migrant construction workers have also figured prominently. Mouin Rabbani, Editor of Quick Thoughts and Jadaliyya Co-Editor, interviewed Hiba Zayadin, Gulf researcher at Human Rights Watch, to get a better understanding of the issues involved.]
Mouin Rabbani (MR): Who are the laborers involved in the construction of facilities for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar? Do we have reliable data about their numbers, countries of origin, average pay, length of stay, and legal status in Qatar, and about worker deaths and injuries?
Hiba Zayadin (HZ): Qatar relies almost entirely on about two million migrants, who make up ninety-five percent of the country’s workforce in sectors ranging from construction to services to domestic work. Qatar’s migrant workers come predominantly from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and the Philippines.
They come to Qatar because they lack stable job opportunities in their home countries, or because they believe they can earn more money working abroad. Many leave behind families who depend on them financially. Qatar has the highest ratio of migrants to citizens in the world. Without these workers, its economy would grind to a halt.
Unfortunately, Qatar’s census data does not disaggregate the population by national origin, nor does Qatar publish regular, independently verifiable statistics on average pay, length of stay, or legal status in the country. In September 2020, Qatar passed legislation establishing a basic minimum wage of 1,000 QAR (USD 274) that applies to all workers, regardless of nationality or employment sector.
For the past four years, Human Rights Watch has repeatedly urged the Qatari authorities to investigate the causes of unexpected or unexplained deaths among often young and otherwise healthy migrant workers, and to regularly make such data—broken down by age, gender, occupation, and cause of death—publicly available. Human Rights Watch has also urged Qatar to adopt and enforce adequate restrictions on outdoor work to protect workers from potentially fatal heat-related risks. Unfortunately, Qatar has refused to make public any meaningful data on migrant worker deaths, and heat regulations designed to protect workers from the dangers of extreme heat and humidity are still woefully inadequate.
MR: What are the main difficulties experienced by migrant workers involved in the construction industry in Qatar, particularly with respect to facilities being built for the 2022 FIFA World Cup?
HZ: Migrant workers traveling to Qatar and other countries in the Gulf region face abuses throughout their migration cycle. It starts in their home countries, where they often pay exorbitant recruitment fees just to secure jobs in Qatar, and often become heavily indebted in the process. When they arrive in Qatar, they are sometimes presented with contracts that pay less than they were promised.
Human Rights Watch research has also shown that abuses of migrant workers’ rights in Qatar are serious and systemic, and that the violations often stem from its labor governance system known as kafala (sponsorship), which ties migrant worker’s legal status in the country to their employers. The system criminalizes “absconding,” that is, leaving an employer without permission, for example to change jobs. Migrant workers are also often subjected to the routine confiscation of their passports by employers, and pay recruitment fees to secure jobs in the Gulf, which can keep them indebted for years.
In conjunction with the prohibition on worker strikes and the ineffective implementation and enforcement of laws designed to protect migrant workers’ rights, these factors have contributed to abuse, exploitation, and even forced labor. Among migrant workers’ most common grievances are non-payment or delayed payment of wages, crowded and unsanitary living conditions, and excessive working hours. Construction workers and migrant workers in the service industry, including cleaners and security guards, are the most vital for hosting a successful World Cup and yet are among the most vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
The Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy—the national body tasked with overseeing the organization of the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar—has put in place additional protections specifically for migrant construction workers employed on stadium sites, which have led to better working conditions. But these protections only apply to about 28,000 workers—just under 1.5 percent of Qatar’s overall migrant population. They do not apply to workers building the metro system, the highways, parking lots, bridges, hotels, and other infrastructure projects essential for hosting the millions of visitors a World Cup will attract. They also exclude cleaners, restaurant staff, security guards, drivers, and stewards—men and women who will shoulder the hospitality sector’s efforts to accommodate the influx of people visiting the country. And even on stadium sites, workers have reported breaches of both Qatari law and the Supreme Committee’s additional protections.
MR: How have the Government of Qatar, FIFA, and others involved in the 2022 World Cup responded to the various criticisms about the treatment of migrant workers involved in the construction of World Cup facilities, and have the measures they have taken made a significant impact?
HZ: In October 2017, following several years of pressure by human rights organizations, media outlets, and international trade unions, Qatar promised to dismantle the kafala system, which gives employers excessive control over migrant workers’ legal status, and to implement other labor reforms as part of a three-year technical cooperation agreement with the International Labour Organization (ILO).
Since then, Qatar has introduced several reforms that chip away at abusive aspects of the kafala system and offer increased labor protections. The most significant of the reforms have been lifting the abusive exit permit requirement for most workers, which prevented migrants from leaving the country without their employer’s permission; allowing migrant workers to change jobs before the end of their contracts without first obtaining their employer’s consent; and a new law establishing a non-discriminatory basic minimum wage for all workers. Qatar also set up Labor Dispute Resolution Committees, designed to give workers a more efficient and faster way to pursue grievances against their employers; passed a law to establish a Workers’ Support and Insurance Fund, partly designed to make sure workers are paid unclaimed wages when companies fail to pay; and introduced amendments that set stricter penalties for employers who fail to pay their workers’ wages.
Yet migrant workers remain vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Inadequate implementation and oversight of current legal provisions mean they rarely translate to worker protections in practice, and employers can pick and choose what protections to offer with relative impunity.
Other abusive elements of the kafala system also remain intact. For example, the minimum wage and increase in penalties for wage abuse, while positive, did not go far enough to eliminate wage abuse. An August 2020 Human Rights Watch report found that employers in Qatar frequently violated workers’ right to wages and that the Wage Protection System, introduced in 2015 and designed to ensure that migrant workers are paid correctly and on time, does not protect workers from wage abuses. It can be better described as a wage monitoring system with significant gaps in its oversight capacity. Wage protection measures have done little to protect workers from wage abuse.
MR: What key measures would need to be implemented to safeguard the rights and safety of these migrant workers?
HZ: Until Qatar dismantles the kafala system in its entirety and allows migrant workers to join trade unions and advocate for their own rights, workers are likely to continue to suffer abuses and exploitation. While some reforms have been introduced, key elements that facilitate abuse remain.
Migrant workers remain completely dependent upon their employers to facilitate entry, residence, and employment in the country, with employers responsible for applying for and renewing workers’ residency and work permits. Workers can find themselves undocumented through no fault of their own when employers fail to carry out these obligations, and it is the workers, not their employers, who suffer the consequences.
Qatar also continues to impose harsh penalties for “absconding”—when a migrant worker leaves their employer without permission or remains in the country beyond the grace period allowed after their residence permit expires or is revoked. Penalties include fines, detention, deportation, and a ban on re-entry.
These provisions can continue to drive abuse, exploitation, and forced labor practices, particularly as workers, especially laborers and domestic workers, often depend on employers not just for their jobs but for housing and food. In addition, passport confiscations, high recruitment fees, and deceptive recruitment practices are ongoing and largely go unpunished, and workers are prohibited from joining trade unions or engaging in strikes.
MR: How does the situation of migrant construction workers in Qatar compare with those involved in the construction industry in other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states?
HZ: Qatar is not alone in its use of the kafala system to govern its migrant workforce. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait also have significantly large migrant worker populations and impose various forms of this system. While Qatar’s reform process has dominated international news, other governments too have declared their intention to restructure or reform their systems. However, these reforms only really tinker with the system and do little to dismantle it.
At present, migrant workers in all six countries remain tied to their employers in terms of entry into the country of destination, and the implementation of reforms that have already been adopted remains uneven across these countries. One of the most common violations of migrant workers’ rights in Gulf countries is employers’ failure to pay workers on time and in full, and low-paid migrant workers across the region remain acutely vulnerable to human rights abuses.
In 2015, in an effort to tackle the prevalent issue of wage abuse, Qatar introduced amendments to its labor law and unveiled the much-touted Wage Protection System (WPS), designed to ensure that employers pay wages to workers in compliance with the labor law. The WPS was originally created by the UAE in 2009, and today all the GCC countries except Bahrain have rolled out versions of the system, but its limitations have been exposed across these countries.
Another concern in all six GCC countries that specifically relates to construction workers and other workers laboring outdoors is the lack of adequate heat regulations to protect the lives of millions of migrant workers who do grueling work in often unbearably hot and humid weather conditions for up to twelve hours a day for six and sometimes even seven days a week.
All GCC countries operate similar summer working hours bans that are not linked to actual weather conditions and temperatures, and instead ban outdoor work during specific times of the day during the summer months. But climate data shows that weather conditions in Qatar and other Gulf countries outside those hours and dates frequently reach levels that can result in potentially fatal heat-related illnesses in the absence of appropriate rest. All six countries should do more to protect those building their infrastructure, shouldering their economies, and caring for their homes and children. The starting point is dismantling the kafala system and ending the prohibition on migrant workers joining trade unions.
(Hiba Zayadin is a Gulf researcher at Human Rights Watch. Courtesy: Progressive International, an international organization uniting and mobilizing progressive left-wing activists and organizations.)
