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In 2010, Qatar, a tiny, oil-rich State in the GCC won the bid to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Not only did Qatar win the right to host the games, it received the burden of public scrutiny for its State practices and human rights abuses. Along with hosting the games comes the onus of constructing stadiums, hotels, conference centers, and new restaurants to house and entertain the influx of visitors. This responsibility alone highlights the most protested practices in the GCC: Kafala and the rights of migrant workers. As the local populations of GCC States are small and disinclined to hard labor, there is an enormous market for migrant workers in the fields of home maintenance and construction. Migrants flock from countries in Southeast Asia and Africa following promises of lucrative jobs and hopes of sending money back home to support their families. Many are met with realities of slavery, forced labor, and horrid living conditions. FIFA’s new presence in Qatar creates a platform for possible reform, but blame is easily passed between Qatar, FIFA, and the States from which migrants were recruited. This paper will highlight migrant working conditions in Qatar, Qatar’s relationship and responsibilities to International Labour Law as well as the ILO. It will also focus on the liability of FIFA to uphold human rights and labor laws during the construction, maintenance, and presentation of the games as well as possible routes of jurisdiction available to victims of unlawful labor practices.
Wealthy Gulf nations have agreed on measures to improve the working and living conditions of migrant workers who constitute a substantial segment, if not the majority, in a number of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states. The measures constitute a bid to fend off more far-reaching demands by human rights and trade union activists who no longer exclusively target Qatar because of its hosting of the 2022 World Cup but the region at large. The measures agreed at a meeting of labour ministers of the GCC that groups Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman, and 12 Asian labour supply nations, including India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and the Philippines, came amid a recent flurry of condemnatory reports by human rights organizations and trade unions. The reports tackle the plight of domestic workers in the Gulf and human rights in the UAE. A Human Rights Watch report on migrant labour in the Emirates is scheduled for publication in January.
Qatar's successful bid for the right to host the 2022 World Cup has put the Gulf state at the forefront of demands for legal changes to its labour regime that potentially could change the very nature of its society and politics and serve as a model for other countries in the region. The bid has also sparked the beginnings of long overdue debate of taboo issues, including rules governing citizenship and naturalization.
This article explores the relational power and responsibilities to migrant workers on physical infrastructure projects in Qatar connected to the sovereign state hosting the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup 2022. Currently, these construction workers operate under the Kafala system, which is upheld in Qatar. However, large numbers of Qatar's visiting migrant construction workers were recorded as injured or killed through incidents that were related to their work. Further still, many other migrant workers reported poor, unsanitary living conditions and being 'trapped' by their Kafil with passports withheld or wages not forthcoming, prompting criticism from international non-governmental organizations. This article adopts a relational sociological approach to discuss how 'responsibilities' for deaths, injuries and illnesses are passed between key actors that include the State of Qatar, FIFA, World Cup sponsors, building contractors and subcontractors , and the recruitment agencies that find workers in other countries to work on the construction sites. As such, it makes three scholarly contributions: it leads in unpacking and discussing the treatment of migrant construction workers in World Cup 2022 infrastructure projects in Qatar; it follows work by Timms in adding to the literature on the passing of responsibilities for migrant workers between states and corporations in globalized societies; and it uses the case to further critically unpack Castells' notions of relational power in networks.
International Labor Rights Case Law
FIFA, Qatar, Kafala: Can the World Cup Create a Better World of Work?This paper proposes a new project, “The South Asian Migrant Workers Alliance” (SAMWA) for ANMR to begin work directly in Qatar that will focus on two key objectives: (1) building much needed migrant worker organizing capacity, including the right to organize; and (2) leveraging the international FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 campaign to mobilize a transnational civil society network that will win migrant labor reform commitments from Qatar at the GFMD. SAMWA seeks to promote what Douglas Johnson calls “more comprehensive strategic approaches” that moves away from expert-driven to the building of broader, multi-sectoral social movements for human rights . Marshall Ganz’s steps of timing, targeting, and tactics will be used to draw specific strategic objectives. Finally, I will identify a multi-pronged set of tactics and a tactical map that uphold Keck and Sikkink’s thesis that transnational civil society networks have powerful impact on forcing states to adhere to international human rights norms and creates the conditions for further advances between states, civil society, and the international community.
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