‘Human tragedy’

Unite general secretary Len McCluskey shares his thoughts after going undercover with The Mirror in a Qatar labour camp, where they find labourers working to get the city ready for the 2022 World Cup living in squalid — and dangerous — conditions.

The video (below) takes viewers into their world of misery.

Our Beautiful Game that is football is stained by the blood and misery of hundreds of thousands of workers treated no better than slaves. What I witnessed and heard in Qatar shames FIFA as well as the rulers of a Gulf monarchy awarded the 2022 World Cup.

 
It is a human tragedy and together we must unite to demand fairness and decency for the legions of abused migrants. Because this will be a football tournament built on the broken backs of the wretched of the earth.

 
Men and women who have been plunged deep into debt to buy their way to Qatar on the promise of higher earnings and tolerable accommodation to build the ‘greatest show’ on earth.

 
People who when they arrive in the fabulously wealthy Middle East state are frequently short-changed, cheated of agreed wages and expected to scrape by on a pittance.

 
Workers who, as I saw, packed 8 or 10 to a room in squalid, unsanitary labour camps for years on end when the law stipulates a maximum four beds.

 
Grafters who have their passports removed so they become prisoners of employers, trapped in Qatar unless unscrupulous bosses issue them permission to leave under the detested kafala system.

 
These toilers are literally worked to death in searing heat which tops 50c in the summer while the authorities are quick to claim they die from natural causes, often a heart attack, to avoid responsibility and compensation.

 
It makes my blood boil to know this is happening amid the opulence of the planet’s richest country per head. The workers constructing the World Cup infrastructure, the roads, hotels, shopping centres and offices as well as the stadiums, deserve to be treated with respect.

 
That’s why Unite and other organisations, in Britain and across the world, will do everything within our power to improve conditions.

 
We will demand that candidates for the FIFA presidency tell the world what they would do to stamp out these abuses and say loud and clear there can be no hiding place for the perpetrators of such inhumanity.

 
Because it doesn’t have to be like this: Wages could be higher, accommodation better, health and safety improved and workers free to leave Qatar when they want.

 
On a Unite delegation to Qatar with the Building Workers’ International trade union confederation, accompanied by Labour MPs Naz Shah and Ian Lavery, we saw the good as well as the bad.

 
If a minority of companies can treat workers as human beings and still make a profit, then the shameful majority have no excuse.

 
Qatar is scared by enemies we also encounter in Britain – hostility to trade unions and a construction industry washing its hands of responsibility by sub-contracting work.

 
If it’s to be worth the 2022 World Cup the desert kingdom must raise its game.

 
Or FIFA must strip the tournament from a land where the dead workers already outnumber the players who would kick a football in six years time.

• This comment first appeared in The Mirror on Friday (January 29)

Are you a football lover outraged by the treatment of workers in Qatar? Join in the fight to support them through the campaign Red Card for FIFA.