As the Persian Gulf emirate prepares to host the 2022 World Cup, the world must demand that it treat its foreign workers humanely.
The Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, flush with oil riches and seeking to push its way to the front of the international stage, is in the midst of an enormous, decade-long building boom to construct facilities and infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup soccer tournament, the largest and most-viewed sporting event in the world. Unfortunately, Qatar is preparing for that moment of international cooperation and sport by grievously exploiting its foreign workers, subjecting them to dangerous conditions that should be drawing forceful condemnations from the world community.
A report last week by the government of India, which supplies a large share of Qatar's workers, suggests that more than 500 of its citizens have died there since 2012, primarily, according to the Guardian, in either on-site accidents or from working in inhumane conditions. Nepal, another big supplier of Qatar's labor force, recorded the deaths of 383 Nepali workers in that country in 2012-13.
International observers and human rights groups have described working conditions for foreign laborers in Qatar as intolerable and inhumane, citing dangerous work sites, confiscations of passports by employers, withheld wages, oppressively overcrowded worker dormitories and limited access to food and water despite 12-hour work shifts often in triple-digit temperatures. Although conditions are difficult for foreign workers in many gulf countries, Amnesty International notes that Qatar is different because of its unusual exit permit system — under which foreign nationals can't leave the country without permission from their employers — its ban on unions and the sheer size of its foreign labor force.
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