Worker Discrimination At Asian Cup in Qatar

Empty seats, but still no room for migrant workers?

The majority of Qatar's immigrants, making up an estimated 70 per cent of the country's one million population (according to this piece at the Canadian site Maclean's), come from South Asia and work in either the domestic or the construction industries. The website reports that many workers are paid $2,200 per annum for 12-hour days, and quotes Human Rights Watch researcher Samer Muscati as saying that their working conditions are the equivalent of "forced labour".

Is there any reason to believe that the oil-wealthy nation will improve those conditions for workers employed to build the eight World Cup stadia? Perhaps, with some pressure from FIFA. Georgetown University, the Washington DC-based educational establishment with a campus in Doha, lobbied for better working conditions on its newest construction site in the Qatari capital, so there's already a precedent for football's governing body to follow.

There's a telling anecdote from a Qatar resident in the comments section to the piece about how he went to a game between Australia and South Korea at the current Asian Confederations Cup and saw five Nepalese migrant workers refused admission to the stadium on the grounds that there were only tickets left for the stadium's Family Section:

"My friend and I were in the 'family' section, where there were several groups of Arab and Western men. Our supposed 'family section' was not a family section at all. It was a general seating area. So, why on earth would five workers be denied entry into a stadium with 10,000 empty seats? Because that is the way things work in Qatar. That is the way it is in malls, in parks and anywhere else that labourers are not wanted. These young men are the very ones who will be building the stadiums, the roads, the infrastructure needed to put on the World Cup when Qatar hosts it in 2022. But, will these workers be allowed into the stadiums? They work long hours in brutal conditions, live in squalid conditions and tend to earn very low wages. Often, their passports are taken away, and they are subject to a system that essentially makes them slaves to their employers."

So, once FIFA has been assured that slave labour working conditions have been eradicated, there's a second Fair Play issue for it to work on the next time it sends a delegation to Qatar. If football is the great leveller that it claims, no one should be turned away at the gates on the grounds of race and class. And especially not at a FIFA-sanctioned tournament like the AFC.