According to a new report from human rights organization Equidem, not much has changed for migrant workers in Qatar in the past two years: the abuses continue to drag on.
The World Football Association FIFA, in particular, gets a blow: their inspections were a measure for nothing, as it turns out. “When FIFA inspectors visited the construction sites, several guest workers were hidden in vans,” Mustafa Qadri, president of the NGO, told VRT NWS.
Ten days before the start of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, the Qatari government and FIFA are confronted with a painful report. New research from the British human rights organization Equidem, which specializes in labour rights worldwide, shows that the Qatari government has not implemented the promised reform of working conditions for guest workers.
That was the deal, however, when FIFA awarded the World Cup to Qatar in 2010. For its research, Equidem spoke with hundreds of guest workers who worked in and around the eight new FIFA stadiums between September 2020 and October 2022.
Qatar introduced several reforms in 2016 to improve the conditions of its 2 million migrant workers. For example, the country has abolished the kafala system by law. In this practice, each guest worker had to call on a local sponsor and could not change jobs. This gave the café or sponsored enormous power and control. In addition, the Qataris introduced a minimum wage.
“All nice on paper, but in reality, little has changed,” said Mustafa Qadri, president of the NGO. He has closely monitored migrant workers in the Gulf region for more than ten years. “Guest workers from poor Southeast Asian and African countries have been greatly exploited over the years. We have been doing this research for 2 years, and I have to say that the results are shocking.”
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