When Nasser al-Khater, Qatar’s World Cup chief, was asked two weeks ago about the recent death of a migrant worker, his response was both shocking and revealing. “We’re in the middle of a World Cup and we have a successful World Cup. And this is something you want to talk about right now? I mean death is a natural part of life,” he said, before going on to offer condolences to the family of the deceased.
First, a sense of outrage and indignation that anyone would challenge Qatar’s narrative about the World Cup and then a callous indifference for the workers who made it possible.
In recent weeks, that outrage, stoked by the Qatari authorities, has been seen in numerous articles calling western criticism of Qatar’s human rights record racist, hypocritical and orientalist.
Most chillingly, we have seen Qatar’s talking points repeated by Eva Kaili – at the time a vice-president of the European parliament – who was charged along with three others last week, in connection with allegations that Qatar used gifts and cash to influence decision-making. Kaili and Qatar deny any wrongdoing.
“The World Cup in Qatar is proof, actually, of how sports diplomacy can achieve a historic transformation of a country … [the International Labour Organization] said that Qatar is a frontrunner in labour rights,” said Kaili in a debate on the country’s human rights record the day after the World Cup kicked off. “Still some here are calling to discriminate them, they bully them and they accuse everyone that talks to them or engages of corruption.”
And yet it is the second part of Khater’s response that explains much of the criticism. The casual dismissal of a worker’s death illustrates what I have seen time and again in almost a decade of reporting on the treatment of Qatar’s low-wage migrant workers – that for the most part, the Qatari authorities just don’t appear to care.
The real scandal of this World Cup is not that the criticism of Qatar is racially motivated, but that the men who built this tournament have been subjected to a labour system based largely on racial discrimination.
That was clear to the former UN special rapporteur on racism, Tendayi Achiume, who in 2020 released a damning report highlighting “serious concerns of structural racial discrimination against non-nationals”. Achiume said a “de facto caste system based on national origin” exists in Qatar, “according to which European, North American, Australian and Arab nationalities systematically enjoy greater human rights protections than south Asian and sub-Saharan African nationalities”.
This discrimination is embedded in “family housing only” zoning regulations that effectively prohibit most migrant workers from living in certain parts of the country and has played out for all to see when low-wage workers have been barred from entering some parks, shopping malls and public spaces.
It is evident in the different wages paid to different nationalities – Nepalis and Bangladeshis are often paid less than Indians or Filipinos for doing the same work, for example. A recent report by human rights group Equidem found that almost half the workers interviewed who were employed on World Cup stadiums reported nationality-based discrimination.
And it is most obvious simply in the way low-wage workers are treated. Twelve years after Qatar won the bid to host the World Cup, tens of thousands of workers remain housed in appalling accommodation and are still forced to pay extortionate recruitment fees for their jobs, often in return for a basic wage that equates to just £1 an hour.
Wage theft appears rampant and arguably got worse in the months leading up to the World Cup, when thousands of workers were sent home, many still in debt, as companies wrapped up construction projects.
The Qatari government has said it has taken wide-ranging actions to create safe conditions for its migrant workers and regulations have been put in place to limit labourers’ exposuer to the searing summer heat. But the authorities have done little to investigate the deaths of thousands of migrant workers, and countless families have been left without answers or compensation from their loved ones’ employers. As Nirmala Pakrin, the widow of a worker who died while employed on a World Cup stadium, said to me recently: “They are making millions … [so] why can’t they even give us a little compensation?”
Geoffrey Otieno, a Kenyan worker who was detained in Qatar for speaking out on workers’ rights, recently wrote about how incensed he was by attempts to dismiss criticism of the treatment of migrant workers as racist, saying: “As a black African worker who made the 2022 World Cup possible, nothing – including the abuses to which I was subjected, and those that I witnessed – has been more infuriating … In Qatar, migrant workers are an expendable commodity.”
Qatar, and its supporters, argue that the country has introduced meaningful reforms, chiefly the dismantling of the abusive kafala system and the introduction of a minimum wage. But these only came into force 10 years after Qatar won the right to host the World Cup. And on the ground, little seems to have changed. The stories I heard from workers in Qatar last month are almost the same as those I heard when I began my reporting in 2013.
It would be oversimplistic to say exploitation in Qatar’s labour system is based solely on race. Like everywhere, race, class and the profit motive combine to marginalise the most vulnerable. But Qatar’s unique population – 95% of the workforce is from overseas – its vast wealth and the attention it sought by hosting the World Cup have exposed and amplified these divisions.
The Qatari authorities are not solely to blame. The day-to-day abuses endured by many low-wage workers are mostly meted out by other migrant workers, typically – according to many workers I have spoken to – managers from India and Egypt. As one worker told me: “The Qatari people are very good, but they have left the country in the hands of people who don’t value human beings.”
Responsibility also lies with powerful Qatari business owners who appear to be untouchable. “It’s a hierarchical system here where no one lower would dare try to do something against someone higher than them,” a construction manager with years of experience in Qatar told me, by way of explaining how influential Qataris can act with impunity.
And then there is Fifa, and scores of foreign companies and individuals who seem to have turned a blind eye while pocketing enormous profits and salaries. A 2018 British government press release claimed British firms were likely to secure deals worth £1.5bn in the run-up to the tournament. Fifa earned a record $7.5bn in the four-year cycle leading up to this World Cup and yet has still failed to agree to a fund to compensate workers who have suffered and the families of those who have died.
Ultimately the responsibility to protect migrant workers lies with governments, and by that standard the Qatari authorities have largely failed. To call this out is not racist, it’s anti-racist.
