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Not worthy of a thread - 2018 FIFA World Cup edition

OzzieMandias

by OzzieMandias
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Tooj

Tooj

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/21/qatar-human-rights-sport-cohen

 

With the European football association, Uefa, reaching the unavoidable conclusion that you cannot play competitive sport in the 50C heat of a Qatari summer, the way is clear for the international football association, Fifa, to break with precedent and make a decision that does not seem corrupt or senseless or both.

 

All being well, the 2022 tournament will be held in the winter. Just one niggling question remains: how many lives will be lost so that the Fifa World Cup™ can live up to its boast that it is the most successful festival of sport on the planet. "More workers will die building World Cup infrastructure than players will take to the field," predicts Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation. Even if the teams in Qatar use all their substitutes, she is likely to be right.

 

Qatar's absolute monarchy, run by the fabulously rich and extraordinarily secretive Al Thani clan, no more keeps health and safety statistics than it allows free elections. The Trade Union Confederation has had to count the corpses the hard way. It found that 83 Indians have died so far this year. The Gulf statelet was also the graveyard for 119 Nepalese construction workers. With 202 migrants from other countries dying over the same nine months, Ms Burrow is able to say with confidence there is at least one death for every day of the year. The body count can only rise now that Qatar has announced that it will take on 500,000 more migrants, mainly from the Indian subcontinent, to build the stadiums, hotels and roads for 2022.

 

Not all the fatalities are on construction sites. The combination of back-breaking work, nonexistent legal protections, intense heat and labour camps without air conditioning allows death to come in many guises. To give you a taste of its variety, the friends of Chirari Mahato went online to describe how he would work from 6am to 7pm. He would return to a hot, unventilated room he shared with 12 others. Because he died in his sleep, rather than on site, his employers would not accept that they had worked him to death. There are millions of workers like him around the Gulf. When we gawp at the wealth that allows the Qatari royals to buy the Olympic Village and Chelsea Barracks, we miss their plight, and the strangeness of the oil rich states, too.

 

How to characterise them? "Absolute monarchy" does not begin to capture a society such as Qatar, where migrants make up 99% of the private sector workforce. Apartheid South Africa is a useful point of reference. The 225,000 Qatari citizens can form trade unions and strike. The roughly 1.8 million migrants cannot. Sparta also comes to mind. But instead of a warrior elite living off the labour of helots, we have plutocrats and sybarites sustained by faceless armies of disposable migrants.

 

The official justification for oppression is, as so often, religious. Migrants and employers are bound by the kafala system – taken from Islamic law on the adoption of children. "Kafala" derives from "to feed". Nourishment is the last thing the system provides, however. It delivers captive labour instead. Migrant workers cannot change jobs without their sponsoring employers' consent. As Human Rights Watch says, if workers walk out, the employers – the adoptive parents – can say they have absconded and the authorities will arrest them.

 

In order to leave Qatar, migrants must obtain an exit visa from their sponsor. This stipulation means that they can be held hostage if they threaten to sue over a breach of contract. Wouldn't it make a bracing change if the religious leaders we hear condemning free speech as blasphemy so often could find the time to damn this exploitation?

 

It is not just poor construction workers who suffer. One might expect that Fifa would have been concerned about the fate of foreign footballers working under kafala contracts. Abdeslam Ouaddou, who once played for Fulham, has warned players not to go near Qatar. Speaking from experience – he played for Qatar SC in the Qatari domestic league – he said that if a player is injured or his form drops, the club can break his contract. If the player goes to lawyers, the club (as "sponsor") can refuse to let him leave the country until he drops his case.

 

Ouaddou got out of Qatar after much tortuous negotiation. But French player Zahir Belounis, a former captain of the team Al-Jaish, is trapped in the country with his family and hasn't been paid for two years. When he went to the international press, he was threatened with defamation proceedings.

 

After promising the International Trade Union Confederation that it would ensure human rights were respected in Qatar, Fifa tells me that it is "promoting a dialogue" to ensure dignified working conditions. Sharan Burrow's colleagues say all they hear is PR flam.

 

It is not just Qatar in 2022. The corruption and waste around the 2014 World Cup has provoked riots in Brazil. As for 2018, Putin's Duma has already restricted the rights of workers preparing the stadiums for the World Cup.

 

Fifa strikes me as a decadent organisation in the political rather than literary meaning of the word. It is an institution whose behaviour contradicts all of its professed purposes. If it cared about football, it would not even have thought of staging a tournament in the Qatari summer. If it cared about footballers, it would take up the case of Belounis. And if it respected human life, it would say that the kafala system could not govern World Cup contracts.

 

I don't know how much longer sports journalists can ignore the abuse Fifa tolerates. The World Cup is overturning all the cliches. People say that "football is a matter of life or death", said Bill Shankly. "It's more important than that." Shankly was joking. Qatar and Fifa appear to mean it. Sport is "war minus the shooting", said Orwell. There may not be any actual shooting in Qatar but workers will die nonetheless.

 

The quote that ought to haunt all who love football is CLR James's paraphrase of Kipling: "What do they know of cricket that only cricket know?" James was writing about how sport was bound up in the Caribbean with colonialism, race and class. Anyone writing about the World Cup must also acknowledge that the beautiful game is now bound up with racial privilege, exploitation and the deaths of men, who should not be forgotten so readily.

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henke

henke

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A big part of the problem is that the people making the decisions are all obsessed with the idea of "legacy", as if the only point of staging a World Cup was to leave behind a bit of sporting infrastructure...

 

Perhaps FIFA could have said before England put a bid together, that you needed to leave a "legacy" to be successful. Would have saved a hell of a lot of time and money.

 

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mrmojorisin75

mrmojorisin75

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this boggles my mind tbh, i can't understand for the life of me why everyone is just going along with it :lol:

 

yes the world cup is fifas but they'd not have a world cup if the major players got together and decided they'll opt out if the football calendar in europe is shifted...how hard can that be, make a few phone calls and get them all on the same page?

 

that'd sort it in no fucking time

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oldtype

oldtype

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this boggles my mind tbh, i can't understand for the life of me why everyone is just going along with it :lol:

 

yes the world cup is fifas but they'd not have a world cup if the major players got together and decided they'll opt out if the football calendar in europe is shifted...how hard can that be, make a few phone calls and get them all on the same page?

 

that'd sort it in no fucking time

 

Surely it can't be that Qatar is bribing key officials at various organizations to get their agenda through.

 

I mean, they've never done anything like that before, right?

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Deuce

Deuce

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Absolutely criminal. FIFA essentially condoning human rights abuses.

 

 

Dozens of Nepalese migrant labourers have died in Qatar in recent weeks and thousands more are enduring appalling labour abuses, a Guardian investigation has found, raising serious questions about Qatar's preparations to host the 2022 World Cup.

 

This summer, Nepalese workers died at a rate of almost one a day in Qatar, many of them young men who had sudden heart attacks. The investigation found evidence to suggest that thousands of Nepalese, who make up the single largest group of labourers in Qatar, face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern-day slavery, as defined by the International Labour Organisation, during a building binge paving the way for 2022.

 

According to documents obtained from the Nepalese embassy in Doha, at least 44 workers died between 4 June and 8 August. More than half died of heart attacks, heart failure or workplace accidents.

 

The investigation also reveals:

 

• Evidence of forced labour on a huge World Cup infrastructure project.

 

• Some Nepalese men have alleged that they have not been paid for months and have had their salaries retained to stop them running away.

 

• Some workers on other sites say employers routinely confiscate passports and refuse to issue ID cards, in effect reducing them to the status of illegal aliens.

 

• Some labourers say they have been denied access to free drinking water in the desert heat.

 

• About 30 Nepalese sought refuge at their embassy in Doha to escape the brutal conditions of their employment.

 

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.

 

"We'd like to leave, but the company won't let us," said one Nepalese migrant employed at Lusail City development, a $45bn (£28bn) city being built from scratch which will include the 90,000-seater stadium that will host the World Cup final. "I'm angry about how this company is treating us, but we're helpless. I regret coming here, but what to do? We were compelled to come just to make a living, but we've had no luck."

 

The body tasked with organising the World Cup, the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee, told the Guardian that work had yet to begin on projects directly related to the World Cup. However, it said it was "deeply concerned with the allegations that have been made against certain contractors/sub-contractors working on Lusail City's construction site and considers this issue to be of the utmost seriousness". It added: "We have been informed that the relevant government authorities are conducting an investigation into the allegations."

 

The Guardian's investigation also found men throughout the wider Qatari construction industry sleeping 12 to a room in places and getting sick through repulsive conditions in filthy hostels. Some say they have been forced to work without pay and left begging for food.

 

"We were working on an empty stomach for 24 hours; 12 hours' work and then no food all night," said Ram Kumar Mahara, 27. "When I complained, my manager assaulted me, kicked me out of the labour camp I lived in and refused to pay me anything. I had to beg for food from other workers."

 

Almost all migrant workers have huge debts from Nepal, accrued in order to pay recruitment agents for their jobs. The obligation to repay these debts, combined with the non-payment of wages, confiscation of documents and inability of workers to leave their place of work, constitute forced labour, a form of modern-day slavery estimated to affect up to 21 million people across the globe. So entrenched is this exploitation that the Nepalese ambassador to Qatar, Maya Kumari Sharma, recently described the emirate as an "open jail".

 

"The evidence uncovered by the Guardian is clear proof of the use of systematic forced labour in Qatar," said Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International, which was founded in 1839. "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."

 

Qatar has the highest ratio of migrant workers to domestic population in the world: more than 90% of the workforce are immigrants and the country is expected to recruit up to 1.5 million more labourers to build the stadiums, roads, ports and hotels needed for the tournament. Nepalese account for about 40% of migrant labourers in Qatar. More than 100,000 Nepalese left for the emirate last year.

 

The murky system of recruitment brokers in Asia and labour contractors in Qatar leaves them vulnerable to exploitation . The supreme committee has insisted that decent labour standards will be set for all World Cup contracts, but underneath it a complex web of project managers, construction firms and labour suppliers, employment contractors and recruitment agents operate.

 

According to some estimates, Qatar will spend $100bn on infrastructure projects to support the World Cup. As well as nine state-of-the-art stadiums, the country has committed to build an airport, $20bn worth of new roads, $4bn for a causeway connecting Qatar to Bahrain, $24bn for a high-speed rail network, and 55,000 hotel rooms to accommodate visiting fans.

 

The World Cup is part of an even bigger programme of construction in Qatar designed to remake the tiny desert kingdom over the next two decades.Qatar has yet to start building stadiums for 2022, but has embarked on the big infrastructure projects likesuch as Lusail City that, according to the US project managers, Parsons, "will play a major role during the 2022 Fifa World Cup". The British engineering company Halcrow, part of the CH2M Hill group, is a lead consultant on the Lusail project responsible for "infrastructure design and construction supervision". CH2M Hill was recently appointed the official programme management consultant to the supreme committee. It says it has a "zero tolerance policy for the use of forced labour and other human trafficking practices".

 

Halcrow said: "Our supervision role of specific construction packages ensures adherence to site contract regulation for health, safety and environment. The terms of employment of a contractor's labour force is not under our direct purview."

 

Some Nepalese working at Lusail City tell desperate stories. They are saddled with huge debts they are paying back at interest rates of up to 36%, yet say they are forced to work without pay.

 

"The company has kept two months' salary from each of us to stop us running away," said one man who gave his name as SBD and who works at the Lusail City marina. SBD said he was employed by a subcontractor that supplies labourers for the project. Some workers say their subcontrator has confiscated their passports and refused to issue the ID cards they are entitled to under Qatari law. "Our manager always promises he'll issue [our cards] 'next week'," added a scaffolder who said he had worked in Qatar for two years without being given an ID card.

 

Without official documentation, migrant workers are in effect reduced to the status of illegal aliens, often unable to leave their place of work without fear of arrest and not entitled to any legal protection. Under the state-run kafala sponsorship system, workers are also unable to change jobs or leave the country without their sponsor company's permission.

 

A third worker, who was equally reluctant to give his name for fear of reprisal, added: "We'd like to leave, but the company won't let us. If we run away, we become illegal and that makes it hard to find another job. The police could catch us at any time and send us back home. We can't get a resident permit if we leave."

 

Other workers said they were forced to work long hours in temperatures of up to 50C (122F) without access to drinking water.

 

The Qatari labour ministry said it had strict rules governing working in the heat, the provision of labour and the prompt payment of salaries. "The ministry enforces this law through periodic inspections to ensure that workers have in fact received their wages in time. If a company does not comply with the law, the ministry applies penalties and refers the case to the judicial authorities."

 

Lusail Real Estate Company said: "Lusail City will not tolerate breaches of labour or health and safety law. We continually instruct our contractors and their subcontractors of our expectations and their contractual obligations to both us and individual employees. The Guardian have highlighted potentially illegal activities employed by one subcontractor. We take these allegations very seriously and have referred the allegations to the appropriate authorities for investigation. Based on this investigation, we will take appropriate action against any individual or company who has found to have broken the law or contract with us."

 

The workers' plight makes a mockery of concerns for the 2022 footballers.

 

"Everyone is talking about the effect of Qatar's extreme heat on a few hundred footballers," said Umesh Upadhyaya, general secretary of the General Federation of Nepalese Trade Unions. "But they are ignoring the hardships, blood and sweat of thousands of migrant workers, who will be building the World Cup stadiums in shifts that can last eight times the length of a football match."

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatars-world-cup-slaves?CMP=twt_gu

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Guest hydeous

Guest hydeous

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This is completely ridiculous, but has been happening for many years now. The scum offering the poor, uneducated people from the villages all across South Asia these 'jobs' tell them they'll be earning some 'x' riyadhs or dinars or whatever, which according to the exchange rate will give these people the idea that they'll be rich in a year. Sadly, everything costs 5 - 10 times as much in those countries and as soon as the labourers land there, they're screwed.

It's a much larger issue than just the world cup, but it's incredible that FIFA has allowed this to happen.

Absolute disgrace.

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leffe186

leffe186

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This is completely ridiculous, but has been happening for many years now. The scum offering the poor, uneducated people from the villages all across South Asia these 'jobs' tell them they'll be earning some 'x' riyadhs or dinars or whatever, which according to the exchange rate will give these people the idea that they'll be rich in a year. Sadly, everything costs 5 - 10 times as much in those countries and as soon as the labourers land there, they're screwed.

It's a much larger issue than just the world cup, but it's incredible that FIFA has allowed this to happen.

Absolute disgrace.

 

They haven't just allowed it to happen, they've specifically made sure that it has.

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Mick

Mick

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This is completely ridiculous, but has been happening for many years now. The scum offering the poor, uneducated people from the villages all across South Asia these 'jobs' tell them they'll be earning some 'x' riyadhs or dinars or whatever, which according to the exchange rate will give these people the idea that they'll be rich in a year. Sadly, everything costs 5 - 10 times as much in those countries and as soon as the labourers land there, they're screwed.

It's a much larger issue than just the world cup, but it's incredible that FIFA has allowed this to happen.

Absolute disgrace.

 

It happens all over the gulf, I remember when loads died at Jebel Ali in Dubai when they were digging out the harbour.

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Mick

Mick

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One of the reasons I've never been to Dubai or other places like that, read some horrible things about the construction etc.

 

The place has been spoiled anyway, it's now just like any other city now except it's been done on a grander scale.

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Mick

Mick

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The treatment of manual workers is terrible, I was watching a house getting built outside of where I was staying and at midday dozens stood in a line side by side to get the shade from a telegraph pole and I'm not joking about that.  The only respite from the heat of the direct sun was something which just happened to be around at the time.

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