This year’s tournament ruled by off-court problems. We are looking at similar issues to the manpower used to build the tournament infrastructure.
The deaths of migrants in Qatar in the run-up to this year’s World Cup have sparked complaints around the world. While tournament organizers put the official number at 40, the Guardian estimates the figure to be in the thousands. Here we explore the key questions surrounding a factor. which has tarnished the World Cup for many fans.
World soccer’s governing body, FIFA, awarded Qatar, a country smaller than Connecticut with little soccer experience, the tournament in December 2010 as part of a bidding process that the U. S. government says was the tournament. In the US, it was riddled with corruption. The shocking resolution sparked a structural frenzy among the wealthy. country, which this year has become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied herbal gas.
The notoriety of the tournament drew attention to Qatar’s dubious human rights record, adding its hostility towards LGBT people and the harmful and exploitative situations faced by the large number of migrants who built the infrastructure.
It’s a World Cup like no other. For more than 12 years, The Guardian has reported on Qatar 2022 issues, from corruption and human rights abuses to redress for migrant staff and discriminatory laws. The most productive of our journalism is piled up on our engaged Qatar homepage: Beyond Football for those who wish to go beyond the pitch.
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“Migrant staff were indispensable in making the 2022 World Cup possible, but it came at a high cost for many migrant workers and their families who only made private sacrifices, but also faced widespread wage theft, injuries and thousands of unexplained deaths. “” said Rothna Begum, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Qatar’s population is approximately 3 million, of which approximately 88% are foreign nationals. The migrant labor force is estimated at two million, or 95% of the workforce. About a million other people are employed in structure and 100,000 are domestic workers For most men, a large consistent percentage comes from the Philippines and South Asian countries, plus India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.
Qatar, the first Middle Eastern country to host the World Cup final, has spent between $220 billion and $300 billion on infrastructure projects as it uses the world’s biggest occasion as a catalyst for nation-building.
At a cost of $6500 million, Qatar built seven new stadiums for the tournament and renovated an eighth. Other structural projects have included major innovations in public transport and roads, and new skyscrapers, hotels and housing, as well as Lusail, a new city that will host the final.
The official count among World Cup venue staff is 37 non-work-related deaths and only 3 work-related accidents, but many of them are a gross underestimate.
The challenge is that it is difficult to associate an exact figure with the tournament and estimate the number of preventable deaths given the lack of available information. FIFA and Qatari organizers have tried to divert the World Cup-related structure from broader projects, though it’s very likely that many wouldn’t have been commissioned without the tournament-inspired boom. And they had tight deadlines to be in a position to receive the influx of around 1. 2 million football fans.
A total of 15,021 non-Qataris died in the country between 2010 and 2019, according to the government. A Guardian investigation in February 2021 found that more than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had died in Qatar since then. the tournament awarded. Death records were not classified by profession or job. The government said 30,000 foreign employees had been hired to build World Cup stadiums.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) found that in 2020, another 50 people suffered work-related deaths, 500 were seriously injured and 37,600 suffered minor to moderate injuries.
Average maximum temperatures in Qatar exceed one hundred F (37. 7 C) for five months of the year. Although the tournament has been moved from summer to winter for the protection and comfort of players, officials and fans, staff are at risk of accidents, heat – similar ailments and other illnesses similar to the physical and intellectual strain of running long hours in excessive heat. Suicide is also a concern. Construction personnel live in miserable situations that contrast with the opulence of many of the services they build.
The Qatari government argued that “the mortality rate within those communities is within the diversity expected by the length and demographics of the population. “Before he was allowed to enter Qatar, he died of entry problems.
Following Pete Pattisson’s report via The Guardian, a 2021 Amnesty International report accused Qatar of “regularly issuing death certificates to migrant staff without proper investigations, rather than attributing deaths to ‘natural causes’ or vaguely explained as ‘heart failure’, causing grieving families to claim compensation.
The organization found that 70% of migrant deaths are classified inaccurately, and knowledge from The Guardian suggests that 69% of deaths among Indians, Nepalese and Bangladeshis were classified as natural. lesions
In 2021, The Guardian highlighted the deaths of employees like Gangaram Mandal, a Nepalese worker who arrived in Qatar in 2018 with his wife and seven daughters. He borrowed money to pay the hiring fees and then earned the equivalent of a dollar a day. After two years, he became ill at the end of a summer shift. His death was described as “heart failure, herbal causes. “
The country has carried out labour law reforms over the past five years, critics say they do not go far enough to protect staff and are applied unevenly. days, unsafe operating conditions, obstacles to converting jobs and limited access to justice, while the deaths of thousands of employees remain uninvestigated,” Amnesty said. .
Teams such as Denmark and the Netherlands have voiced more complaints about career and human rights situations than FIFA, which has banned players from wearing “OneLove” rainbow armbands. Shortly before the tournament, FIFA President Gianni Infantino suggested the groups “concentrate on football. “
Infantino then claimed FIFA deserved credit for influencing Qatar to standards, added that it abolished its abusive “kafala” employee sponsorship system, and said the country’s complaint smacked of Western hypocrisy.
Concerns about LGBT rights, forced labour and insecure situations also marred the last World Cup, in Russia in 2018. A report by the International Union of Building and Wood Workers revealed that 21 structural staff members have died in stadiums in Russia, basically as a result of a fall from height or being hit by a falling team.