At
least 36 have died since September report on plight of migrant
workers
It
is headline news and yet a commonplace. Slavery and death are at the
heart of the 165 billion euro construction boom that is the 2022 FIFA
World Cup in Qatar.
The
chief executive of the World Cup organising committee in Qatar says
the tournament would not be built on the blood of innocents. But it
will be built on blood; on the blood of the poor and the enslaved,
who mainly come from Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, The
Philippines, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Corporate
sponsors such as Visa, Coca-Cola, Adidas, Hyundai and Budweiser
continue to support the event, despite pressure on them to review
their positions. Some are signing new deals to take them to 2022.
There is profit to be made and the lives of immigrant workers are
front-end costs that the sponsors do not bear.
We
call upon civilised governments as a matter of the greatest urgency
to demand that Qatar takes meaningful action to protect foreign
workers on its soil – including reform of the kafala
system of labour, which encourages employers to treat their workers
as property rather than human beings.
Employers
sponsor workers and hold their passports. Because they need exit
visas to leave the country, they are effectively enslaved. Reports of
workers signing for pay they never received, in order to secure the
return of their passports, are widespread.
The
International Trades Union Confederation has labelled the failure of
the Qatari government to address this issue as the action of a slave
state.
We'd
like to leave, but the company won't let us. 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.
Writer
and footballer, Albert Camus was right. In the negative.
All
that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to
football.
www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter
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