The UN labour agency, International Labour Organization (ILO), together with Amnesty International have on Thursday, April 7, 2022, called on World Cup host, Qatar to protect thousands of security guards who a report said were victims of “forced labour”.
According to a study by Amnesty International, guards posted at World Cup stadiums, Ministries and offices often had to work months, sometimes years, without a day off.
Amnesty noted that 34 current or former guards it interviewed “described routinely working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, often for months or even years on end without a day off”. One account of a Bangladeshi guard revealed that he did not get a day off for three years. It added that those who took a legal weekly day off had wages cut. Guards also lost money for taking a toilet break without getting cover, taking a day off sick or just wearing their uniform “improperly”. The men also complained that they worked outside Qatar’s notorious summer when temperatures hit 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). Guards from Uganda and Kenya said they worked more in the heat and received lower wages than other nationalities.
Stephen Cockburn, an Amnesty Researcher, intimated that “physically and emotionally exhausted, workers kept reporting for duty under threat of financial penalties, or worse, contract termination or deportation”.
Work or deportation
Following previous criticism, in 2017, Qatar introduced a minimum wage, cut working hours that can be worked in the heat and ended part of a system that forced migrant workers to seek employers’ permission to change jobs or even leave the country. But Amnesty International emphasized that there is still a “massive power imbalance” between employers and migrant workers in Qatar, where trade unions are banned.
Head of the UN’s International Labour Organisation office in Doha, Max Tunon, said: “Qatar’s laws on working time for security guards are clear but are too often violated”. He also added that overtime must be “voluntary, limited and paid at a higher rate” in line with the law. In an indirect reference to the upcoming World Cup Organisers and other major Qatari Enterprises, Tunon said “Clients contracting security companies should do their due diligence and monitor the treatment of guards, including their working hours and living conditions”.
Progress by far made
Although Qatar insisted it cracked down on hundreds of “unscrupulous” companies, it acknowledged that abuses still take place. An army of migrant labourers from Africa and Asia work as poorly paid guards across the tiny emirate whose energy wealth fuelled a construction boom, with thousands more underway for the World Cup.
Qatar’s World Cup Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy confirmed that three security companies involved in last year’s Club World Cup and FIFA Arab Cup tournaments are “blacklisted” from future projects. The three were found to be in “completely unacceptable” breaches of its Workers Welfare Standards. The Committee averred in all, seven contractors were blacklisted from its projects and more than 220 were on a watchlist. Fifty companies were also blocked by the Labour Ministry from World Cup projects. The Committee however pointed out that there will always be “contractors attempting to beat the system, regardless of stringent regulations or monitoring”.
The Labour Ministry said cases of abuse are falling, but the report by Amnesty International ignored progress made in Qatar since it was awarded the World Cup in 2010.
“The reality is that no other country has come so far so quickly, but for some the pace of change will never be fast enough.”
Labour Ministry
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