Assuming western hemisphere project/site management (Qatar would hardly be penny pinching) , I would expect the totals for on-site worker injuries/deaths to be made available by said management (would be a PR disaster to have high numbers ostensibly on their watch) .
The official number of deaths is 3 for on-site injuries. For comparison the number of construction industry deaths in the UK was 30 last year.
Coincidentally, there were two on-site deaths when building Wembley, but that's not important right now...
So the next thing would be to get the stats for on-site injuries (doing the histogram "bins" by severity) , and comparing them to peer size/scale construction projects around the world.
Indeed it would but I don't have my confidence in the Qatari data being truthful. What I do know is that the claims of thousands of deaths caused by the construction work are entirely incorrect.
Given that you don't believe the data to be accurate, I'm not sure how you could come to that conclusion.
Because the data being quoted is clearly the total number of deaths in the immigrant worker population over 10 years.
Reports of workers dying on that scale would IMHO be difficult to hide (more so if western hemisphere companies had serious involvement in the site/project management) . Injury data by contrast would have incidents over a spectrum of severity, and you could easily prevaricate on that. For example : I give you the stat that 100 workers were injured over the construction phase. For the number of workers involved, that may be deemed o be quite good safety. But if all of those injuries were dismembered arms, crushed legs etc, then that is a completely different story. A story that one can evade by not giving the dimensioning by injury type.
Approximately 6500 migrant workers have died in the period since Qatar was awarded the world cup. Of these, 37 deaths were directly linked to world cup related infrastructure. Of these, 34 are officially recorded as 'non-work related'. This part is crucial, as these deaths are attributed to and notarized (by the migrant's native country - without their implicit collusion in return for pay-offs none of this ponzi scheme can happen) as "death by natural causes". This tends to include things like: cardiac arrest, dehydration and heat stroke. The remaining 3 deaths are the only ones that literally occurred in a 'work related' context, as they would have been a result of workplace accidents or equipment malfunction etc. But it is pretty obvious that the other 34 deaths are as much 'work related' as these, given the fact that until as recently as 2019, migrant workers worked in excess of 10 hour shifts in blistering sun, and the fact that all but a handful of the 'natural causes' group were all in their physical prime, that the total number of official world cup deaths is in all likelihood the full 37 documented. The other huge grey area is that of those 6500 total deaths, swathes of migrant workers are never officially registered on arrival in Qatar, which means after their deaths they essentially 'disappear' from the legal grid. Their deaths are minimally reported, sparingly registered and seldom investigated. Unless the migrant's country of origin has an official notarisation agreement with Qatar (such as India and Nepal), the level of clarity over the whereabouts, wellbeing and cause of death of a migrant is almost zero. So in conclusion, **** Qatar. **** FIFA.
That's all very fine from this end but do you think the very poor people from India, Nepal and Bangladesh who were able to send many times their normal home earnings back to their families by virtue of being employed in Qatar would appreciate our intervening to stop them being exploited? Especially since we can offer them no prospect at all of work in this country due to our extreme positions on immigration. Both FIFA and Qatar should have done much more to protect the workforce for sure but lots of people have benefited and I seriously doubt that the working conditions and life expectancy in Qatar were actually worse than in their homeland.
RIP Leslie Phillips. A fabulous character and a son of Tottenham. I met him a couple of times, as his daughter was friends with my mum back in the 70's and 80's. He was a proper, nice bloke and very funny.
Oh no! I hadn't heard. One of the last of that generation of comic actors (also pretty good serious actor too). King of the innuendo of course, could probably make any line sound like an innuendo even if there wasn't. Great voice too, made a good hat. RIP. Very sad.
World Cup 2022: Qatar ambassador comments on homosexuality 'harmful and unacceptable' - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/63561340 Imagine if you swapped Qatar for South Africa and LGBTQ+ for "coloured and black"...you have the reason that South Africa was rightly boycotted for decades. It is no more cultural to hate on LGBTQ+ folk than it is to hate on Asians or Africans etc. It's simply bigoted. Believe what the **** you want, that's everyone's right but the minute that some one is treated as a lesser person cos of skin colour, sex, who they have sex with or religion etc. then it's out of order for me. Fifa support the rainbow lace campaign but have given the world cup to Russia and now Qatar (both with appalling human rights records towards LGBTQ+ people)...hypocrites. Rant over.... Edit...not quite... **** Qatar **** Fifa Now rant over
This is a very dangerous line of reasoning. Is it ok to occasionally hit a girl whose father was violently abusive, since she has it better here than she did at home? Of course it isn't. Granted, the workers are able to send money home to their families but that doesn't absolve a country with a GDP close to 4.5x that of the country of origin (Nepal for example) from doing much, much more. It is no coincidence that the louder international pressure got, the more measures Qatar slowly and very reluctantly introduced. From allowing FIFA officials to oversee construction sites, to approving and the extending a mandatory 'heat of the day' break from work (shift hours were moved forward to start at 4am to compensate), to increasing the provision of water and sodium supplements on site. All of these measures were well within the state's reach from day one, yet it took close to 7 years for even the first glimpse of progress to emerge, and that only after intense international pressure. The argument that working conditions may well be worse in Nepal (highly debatable once we move beyond average pay) is precisely the salient point here that Qatar is exploiting: find a docile and desperate labour force who won't utter a word of complaint because 'back home' it's worse, improve their standards just ever so slightly that they'll keep coming back and send for their friends and family to join them; sit back, relax, tally the bodies and enjoy the profit. It's a sickening form of Stockholm Syndrome and the fact that all of a sudden virtue signalling clubs and corporations are suddenly waking up to it just a week before the tournament tells us all we need to know about the West's moral compass.
My point is that the West's moral compass is what is actually wrong in this situation. Qatar is certainly not acting with high moral standards. But most western countries don't allow immigrant workers from poor countries at all so give them no opportunities to improve their living standards. Of course Qatar could have done a lot better but we are not exactly in a position where we can complain. Your first analogy is interesting....surely sometimes a relative improvement is better than the status quo even if not perfect.
I entirely agree. But when the World Cup was held in England in 1966, homosexuality was illegal here. The world is on a path to understanding that all forms of discrimination are wrong, but I think that homosexuality is still illegal in the majority of countries so it is unreasonable to expect FIFA to have a strong policy on it.
It’s literally in Article 4 of the FIFA statutes. https://digitalhub.fifa.com/m/7e791c0890282277/original/FIFA-Statutes-2021.pdf Page 11, right there. How much stronger can you get? Though 4.2 gives them a get out clause for 4.1.
