10 November 2022. Less than a week from the kick off for World Cup 2022 in Qatar, WBI Executive Director Dr Bonny Ling moderates the press release discussion for Equidem’s in-depth report, titled ‘If we complain, we are fired,’ on the extent of discrimination and human rights violations against the migrant workers who built the football stadium sites.
The report by Equidem, a human rights and labour right charity, details a consistent pattern of migrant workers from Africa and Asia responsible for the construction of the stadiums suffering serious physical abuse and human rights violations at the hands of major construction firms in Qatar, despite encouraging labour reforms adopted by the government in response to increased international scrutiny.
[screenshots – courtesy of Equidem’s YouTube channel. Video available here]
The report used a complex methodology combining one to one, in-depth interviews with 60 employees, as well as speaking with almost a thousand workers employed across all eight FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 stadiums. In total, these stadiums employed over 30,000 migrant workers. The migrant workers’ countries of origin were diverse, from Bangladesh, India, and Nepal to Kenya and Uganda.
As Equidem’s Founder and Executive Director Mustafa Qadri highlighted, the aim behind the report was to give workers their voices. As Geoffrey Owino, a former worker in Qatar and now a human rights activist and investigator, stated:
Silence encourages injustice. Best solution [to solve the human rights crisis in Qatar for the production of FIFA’s World Cup 2022] is speaking up.
Nepalese worker Anish Adhikari who worked on the Lusail Stadium World Cup stadium spoke movingly on camera about what he experienced as a migrant labourer in Qatar. After he was promised a certain salary working as an electrician, he agreed to leave his home for Doha. Being also a football fan, he was also attracted by the prospect of contributing to the world’s most famous football event.
After Anish’s arrival, however, he received a much lower salary than first promised, which landed him in debt and forced to work unpaid overtime. On top of this, the actual work demanded of him did not match the description that he had initially agreed upon, involving a significantly higher risk of injury and physical effort.
Next Steps
One of the interviewed workers spoke of how the greatest injustice was ‘the lack of robust justice system to address worker and human rights violations.’
Equidem calls on FIFA and the government of Qatar to establish a genuinely independent Migrant Workers Centre in Qatar that would advance freedom of association for workers and finally create a modern, rights-respecting labour system.
It also calls for the establishment of a Remedy Fund to provide remedy, including financial compensation, for serious migrant abuses, which include deaths, injuries, unpaid wages, and the payment of recruitment costs for their jobs in Qatar.
Looking ahead to the World Cup 2026, to be jointly held in U.S.A, Canada and Mexico, it is important to take the lessons learned from this tournament to ensure that workers voices are heard and their rights fully respected.
[Screenshots – courtesy of Equidem’s YouTube channel. Video available here]
