Death Toll Rises in Qatar Due to World Cup Preparations

Foreign workers in Qatar face dangerous working and living conditions, and many cannot leave the country (Wikipedia)

A report by the Guardian on February 23 revealed that an estimated 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar in the 10 years following that country’s successful bid to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Many of those workers, who are predominantly from the countries of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, sought work in Qatar as part of the effort to build the eight stadiums planned to be used in the World Cup.

Some details are still unclear about the nature of the deaths. Qatar does not include information about occupation and employment in death records, so the number of fatalities related to the construction of the sports facilities is not clear. A BBC article from 2015 examined the claim that 1,200 deaths were directly linked to the construction effort, but it was unable to verify that number. 

The ambiguity largely results from discrepancies in how deaths are counted in Qatar versus the countries of origin of the workers. The Guardian expressed that embassies were reluctant to share the records on fatalities, and each embassy records deaths in a different format. The single most common cause of death for all foreign workers as marked by official records is “natural causes”; in fact, 34 of the officially declared 37 fatalities in the World Cup projects have been marked as such. However, in most cases there was no mention of any particular disease or underlying condition that lead to death; records used non-descriptive terminology such as “respiratory failure” and “sickness.” Human Rights Watch contends that these records were made to be deliberately ambiguous to impede the efforts of investigators to determine whether the worker perished on the part of unsafe working conditions.

Foreign workers in Qatar, which amount to 88 percent of the entire population of the country, find work through third-party agents, who charge recruitment fees for their service. An Amnesty International report found that these fees ranged from $500 to $4,300, placing many workers and their families in immediate debt. Deaths attributed to natural causes are automatically classified as non-work related, barring the family of the deceased from receiving compensation. Some workers also claimed that their agents promised them a much higher salary than they were actually offered. All stated that employers confiscated their passports on arrival. 

The International Trade Union Confederacy (ITUC) conducted a review of the state of workers on the World Cup construction sites, and it came to the conclusion that Qatar should not be allowed to host the event. Until labor reforms passed in early 2020, employers had total control over their foreign workers, such as the ability to alter wages without warning, refuse a visa to exit the country or switch jobs, and issue ID cards without which the worker may be imprisoned. Besides this form of bureaucratic oppression, living and working conditions were found to be equally atrocious.

One interviewee described the site’s safety as the worst he had seen in 30 years, with a number of unreported accidents, with complaints to superior officers either met with dismissal or threats of being fired. Another, who was injured in a workplace accident resulting in a leg infection, had to return to his quarters with an open wound. Local medical personnel improperly fitted dressing on the wound, resulting in the infection growing rapidly worse. He had to live exclusively off the generosity of his friends while fighting a two-year battle for compensation. 

Asides from accidents, the weather itself is a danger: temperatures may reach up to 122° F (50° C) in the summer followed by heavy rains in the fall, which flood the workers’ barracks and have led to a number of accidental electrocutions. It is partly for this reason that the World Cup event, traditionally played in June and July, has been moved to December 2022.

A statement by a FIFA spokesperson delivered to the Guardian declared the organization’s full commitment to protecting the rights of workers, writing, “The frequency of accidents on FIFA World Cup construction sites has been low when compared to other major construction projects around the world.” In an interview with NPR, reporter Pete Pattison, who contributed to the exposé, commented that FIFA took no significant efforts to demand improvements for the wellbeing of the workers, and the increased attention brought to Qatar by the World Cup was unlikely to be enough of a factor for the government to intervene itself.