Migrant workers died for World Cup
Glittery event in Qatar takes a human toll
From his home in Bangladesh, Emran Khan watches on his laptop as World Cup teams face off in Qatar’s Lusail Stadium.
But he doesn’t think of the players or the tens of thousands of cheering fans.
Instead, he remembers heaving hundreds of 20-pound concrete blocks for up to 16 hours a day in the scorching sun. He remembers his colleagues vomiting and fainting when the temperature soared to 122 degrees. And he remembers those who died.
“We die for work,” Khan said via video call from Dhaka, shaking his head. “We are human beings at the end of the day. We are not machines.”
Khan, 34, is indebted and traumatized by his two years in the oil-rich emirate. He’s just one of the millions of migrants who worked in the Persian
“We die for work. We are human beings at the end of the day. We are not machines.” Emran Khan, Bangladesh
Gulf state in the lead-up to the World Cup. As teams enter the second week of play, he and other activists are calling attention to the true human toll of the controversial tournament.
“There is a lot of pain behind this event,” Anish Adhikari, 27, a migrant worker from Nepal, said through a translator. “We contributed to build the stadiums and make the event happen, but at the same time we faced challenges – from nonpayment to deception and other sorts of abuses.”
Some lost their lives. While the Qatari government acknowledges dozens of deaths among migrants ahead of the World Cup, human rights groups say thousands died to make the games possible.
The ‘kafala’ system
FIFA, international soccer’s governing body, said the World Cup being held in Qatar largely contributed to better protection for workers, and the organization continues “applying pressure on companies when needed to ensure remediation of workers involved in FIFA World Cup preparations.”
Qatar was chosen as the site of the World Cup in 2010 after a bid the U.S. Justice Department later concluded involved bribery. Since then, the small nation has pumped more than $220 billion into infrastructure, including eight new stadiums, scores of hotels, a metro system and expansions to its airports and roadways, Qatar Central Bank data shows.
About 1.5 million fans from around the world are expected to visit for the 29-day tournament, according to a study of ticket sales by London-based Capital Economics. The tournament is expected to generate a record $7.5 billion in revenue, according to FIFA.
“Doha was ripped up and rebuilt in many respects to make this tournament possible,” said Nick McGeehan, a founding director of FairSquare Research and Projects who advocates for migrant workers’ rights.
Qatar has a population of nearly 3 million people. But just a fraction – about 300,000 – are citizens. The country is home to more than 2 million migrant workers, who are largely responsible for the rapid construction, according to the nonprofit Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.
The construction was largely done through an exploitative system of bonded labor, known as the “kafala,” or sponsorship, which binds foreign workers to their sponsor (typically the employer). It’s a legal framework found in Jordan, Lebanon and Arab Gulf states.
In Qatar, that meant migrant workers had passports confiscated upon arrival, said Natasha Iskander, a migration scholar and professor at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. They couldn’t change or quit jobs without permission or withhold labor for any reason – even nonpayment of wages or dangerous conditions. Protesting and unionizing was prohibited. Workers needed an exit visa approved by their employer to leave the country.
“There are two societies in Qatar and the Gulf. You have the wealthy segment of society, which is Qataris and Western workers,” McGeehan said. “But that’s only a tiny fragment of the population. The country is sustained by a low-paid migrant workforce who live in entirely different conditions – in slum-like conditions on the outskirts of the city.”
Khan said he traveled to Qatar in 2016 with hopes of earning money to make a better life for his family. He took on debt to pay a $3,000 recruitment fee and was promised a job as an engineering assistant for about $350 a month.
Instead, he found himself working as a “laborer” at multiple stadiums and living with three roommates in “labor city,” a camp for workers on the outskirts of Doha. He made about $200 a month after his company deducted a fee for food.
Khan said he would wake up each morning before 5 a.m., wait for the company vehicle and pass out in the car, unsure where he’d be sent. “It’s mental torture. You don’t know what will happen next day,” he said.
Khan said that when a concrete cube fell on his leg, he couldn’t stop work because he would just have to work double the next day to hit his targets. When he raised frustrations with his employer, Khan said, the employer threatened to send him back to Bangladesh.
Amid international scrutiny and widespread reports of human rights violations, Qatar partnered with the United Nations labor agency the International Labour Organization to make legal changes to the kafala system in 2017. Now, workers are able to change jobs, leave the country at will and file complaints with labor courts. There’s also a minimum wage of $275 a month.
On paper, migrant workers in Qatar now have more rights than some migrant workers in the U.S., Iskander said. “In practice, though, industry practices that grew out of the kafala system are very much enforced,” she said.
The abuses continue
Adhikari said he endured numerous abuses during his time in Qatar. He left his home in Khotang, Nepal, in early 2019 to work on Lusail Stadium, where the World Cup final will be played.
Adhikari said he was promised work as an electrical helper at about $250 a month. Instead, he worked as an “unloader” and insulator helper and was paid about $200 a month, which, minus the company deduction for food, came out to about $165, he said.
Adhikari lived at what he called a “labor camp” where the air conditioning didn’t work, water was limited and bathing required waiting in long lines. Asked about the food, Adhikari grimaced. He said it was so bad some workers got diarrhea but would not be allowed to go to the toilet. “We would not have even a minute to take a rest,” he said.
‘The shock of my life’
Geoffrey Owino, 40, spent nearly four years in the country from 2018 through this past June. In Kenya, he paid a $1,500 recruitment fee and was promised work for $400 a month. He ended up living in a room with seven other people, sleeping in bunk beds and earning just $200 a month.
“I got the shock of my life on Day 1,” Owino said via video call from Nairobi.
Owino, who helped form a labor union back in Kenya, said his company fired him in 2020 because he was “educating people on their rights.” He secured a new job as a safety inspector at Lusail Stadium.
“It was eye-opening because the laws were very clear,” Owino said. “The problem is, those laws were there as mere formality.”
Owino said migrants were forced to work at heights in extreme heat and dangerous conditions, creating fall hazards.
The conditions had deadly consequences.
Toll may never be known
It’s unclear how many people have been killed or injured working on projects tied to the World Cup.
On Monday, Hassan AlThawadi, secretary-general of the Supreme Committee of Delivery and Legacy, the World Cup organizing committee, said during a television interview that an estimated 400 to 500 migrant workers died as a result of World Cup projects.
But organizers walked that back in a statement, saying there were 414 work-related fatalities “covering all sectors and nationalities” – not just World Cup projects – nationwide from 2014 to 2020.
The committee’s official death toll among migrants working on World Cup projects is far smaller. Organizers have reported three “work-related” deaths at stadiums and 37 “nonwork-related” deaths since 2014.
But many of those “nonwork-related” deaths – among migrants from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey and Ethiopia – appear work-related.
Consider the deaths of three migrants last year working at Lusail Stadium, where 80,000 people will celebrate the World Cup final next month on International Migrants Day.
One started feeling dizzy while on break. One stepped out of the machine he was operating and collapsed. One was found unresponsive in his room. Their deaths were all listed as “non-work-related” and attributed to “natural causes.”
Disputes over numbers
A report last year from the International Labour Organization concluded it is “currently not possible” to put a number on occupational injuries and fatalities in Qatar. “There is a need to review the approach taken to investigating deaths of seemingly healthy young workers from ‘natural causes,’ to be able to determine whether they are in fact work-related,” it said.
Among Nepali migrant workers in Qatar, a “large proportion” of deaths attributed to heart problems were actually likely a result of heatstroke, a 2019 study by a team of international researchers found.
In the absence of reliable data from Qatar, media outlets and human rights groups have focused on numbers from migrants’ home countries to describe the scope of the problem.
A widely circulated report from The Guardian last year found more than 6,500 workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka died in Qatar from 2010 to 2020.
The figure includes all ages and occupations but does not include deaths of migrants from other countries that regularly send workers to Qatar.
More than 17,000 non-Qataris of all ages, occupations and countries of origin died in Qatar from 2010 to 2020, official government statistics show.
“It’s impossible to precisely say how many have died, and a shouting match between figures is essentially what’s going on,” McGeehan said.
Ruba Jaradat, ILO Regional Director for Arab States, told USA TODAY Sports that proper investigations are “important to ensure workers’ families receive due compensation.”
In a statement, Qatar’s World Cup organizing committee said it “investigates all nonwork-related deaths and workrelated fatalities.”
This year, a coalition of human rights groups launched a campaign calling on Qatar and FIFA to establish a fund to compensate workers and their families for unpaid wages, forced labor, injuries and death. The coalition demands FIFA set aside at least $440 million for the fund – the equivalent of prize money distributed at the World Cup. Qatar has already paid out at least $350 million in unpaid wages to more than 37,000 workers through its Workers’ Support and Insurance Fund, according to the ILO.
Advocates say the rights of migrant workers in Qatar and worldwide need to remain an international priority beyond this year’s World Cup.
“Qatar is not a uniquely bad actor here. The working conditions in Qatar and the legal framework governing migrant work in Qatar are not that different from the working conditions that migrants face all around the world,” Iskander said.
She urged Americans to reflect on the U.S. migrant labor system, especially with the 2026 FIFA World Cup to be held in Canada, Mexico and the U.S.
“What (FIFA) has delivered here is a human rights catastrophe, and the baton – that World Cup baton – is about to be passed to the U.S. And it will be tainted with the legacy of Qatar 2022,” McGeehan said.
For Owino, it’s hard to think about watching any matches in the coming weeks. He’s not sure if he’ll ever watch a World Cup again.
“My body wishes to watch but my heart is no longer there. It’s not ethically right.”