Risk of arrest was real and so was the horror. This World Cup is built on blood and tears
Under cover of darkness and despite risk of arrest, I met the workers building Qatar’s spectacular World Cup tournaments.
The risks were real, so was the horror.
Last month Qatar 2022 chief executive Nasser Al Khater claimed the Gulf state had received unfair criticism over hosting the tournament “not based on factual reality”.
But when I visited the workers’ camps in 2014, with then former Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy, we saw for ourselves the misery and squalor suffered by thousands of impoverished migrant labourers who built the stadiums, hotels and roads that will be used by one million football fans next month.
We discovered how employers had confiscated labourers’ passports to stop them fleeing and how many workers had not seen their families for years.
We were also told of healthy young men dying from heart attacks and heat exhaustion from working in searing temperatures.
One worker told us: “We are trapped in a nightmare. We are treated like animals, not human beings.”
In April 2014, I joined Mr Murphy, who was the UK party’s shadow international development secretary at the time, on a fact-finding investigation organised by the International Trade Union Confederation.
Under cover of darkness, despite the risk of arrest and imprisonment, we visited camps to witness the truth about the plight of the migrant workforce.
One camp, just a half-hour drive from the gleaming city skyline of Doha, housed more than 2,000 men in slum-like conditions.
As we arrived, there was an overpowering smell of excrement, which we found to be the result of toilets being holes in the floor.
Dirty water or sewage flowed under our feet and workers cooked their food on filthy, grimy grills and stoves with no sign of fridges or freezers.
Workers washed themselves using buckets of water and salty water was used for drinking. Sleeping conditions were no better. Some were packed 12 to a room measuring just 4m by 4m. They revealed how they had paid hundreds of pounds to secure jobs in Qatar through recruitment agencies. But once they had got there, the companies they worked for confiscated their passports. We discovered some were being paid as little as £132 a month – less than the price of some tickets for opening-round matches at the stadiums they had helped to build.
Some of the workers wore football tops but they couldn’t even watch or listen to matches as they had no TVs, radio or internet access.
Arguably they were the lucky ones. Some revealed their employers had not paid them for months, despite desperately needing the money to send to their families back home.
Lahiru, from Sri Lanka, told us how his employer had disappeared and he had not been paid for six months.
“I haven’t seen my wife or son for five years. My son is six now,” he told us at the time. “I keep telling myself I will be home the next month. The truth is that I don’t know when or how I will get home.”
Sajith, from Sri Lanka, lost almost all of the sight in his left eye after a masonry nail went into it.
The company he worked for did not give him safety glasses, and it was only after his injury that workers were given safety glasses.
He was told by a doctor to take three months off work to recover, but could only afford to take 15 days off as he was not paid while he was sick.
“Being blind in one eye makes the job more difficult but I have to keep working,” he said.
When the beautiful game is played next month, it will be in stadiums built on unnecessary blood, tears and misery.
That’s the “factual reality”.