Will Qatar's World Cup Games Be Played Over Workers' Bodies?

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.

In the oil-rich Persian Gulf emirate Qatar, there are fewer than 2 million people. And of them, less than 15 percent are actually Qatari nationals. The overwhelming majority are foreign workers. And the project that most of those workers are engaged in these days is preparing Qatar for the 2022 World Cup. That means completing a new airport, building nine state-of-the-art stadiums, new roads, a causeway, a high-speed rail network and more than 50,000 hotel rooms. The estimates of what this will cost range up to $220 billion.

And The Guardian newspaper reports a still more horrifying estimate, and that is that the construction in Qatar will cost the lives of 4,000 migrant workers. The paper describes the conditions under which Nepalese migrants work as amounting to modern-day slavery as defined by the International Labor Organization. Robert Booth is one of the reporters on this story and he joins us now. Where does the projection of 4,000 deaths come from?

ROBERT BOOTH: So that is a conservative estimate, I'm afraid, which emerges from the calculations made by the International Trades Union Confederation, which has been very hot on this situation for the last couple of years. And what they've done is they've looked at the rates of deaths among Nepali and Indian workers at the moment who are in Qatar, and they've extrapolated that for the next eight years before a ball is kicked in the 2022 World Cup and estimated that, unless there are significant changes in the working conditions, that is the number that will die in the meantime.

SIEGEL: The Guardian has reported on the deaths of Nepalese workers just this past summer in Qatar and often from heart failure, I gather. What have you found?

BOOTH: Yes. Well, my colleagues who were reporting on the ground in Qatar and Nepal discovered that there were 44 Nepalese died between the fourth of June and the eighth of August and that they died from a number of causes, some being workplace accidents but many being heart failure or heart attacks. At least, that is the attribution. It leaves it rather up in the air exactly why they died. Of course, what we do know, there's been a lot of ill health because of insanitary conditions in the living quarters as well as the very long, tough working days in temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

SIEGEL: Yes. How would you describe the typical work conditions of people who were doing construction in Qatar these days?

BOOTH: Well, the most arduous conditions that we've found have been Nepali and Indian laborers describing days as long as 15 hours, sometimes only eating one relatively frugal meal in that entire period, working in those high temperatures. And the key problem apart from the sheer back-breaking nature of the work is that many of these workers simply aren't being paid.

SIEGEL: Let's go back to the big headline number here, the projection of 4,000 deaths. Let's assume that some workers would die in a humanely managed construction project. If it takes more than 10 years and employs tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, what would be an expected number?

BOOTH: Well, yes, that's a - I mean, it's a difficult question to answer because part of that has to do with the demography of the workers. But the ITUC, the International Trades Union group, when I asked them the same question, said that the death rate among migrant workers in Qatar in terms of onsite construction deaths was currently running at around five times that in the U.K. at the moment. Many of these deaths aren't just related to accidents or the safety problems onsite, but they're more to do with the workers being worked into the ground.

SIEGEL: What have the Qataris said in response to the Guardian's reporting?

BOOTH: Well, the Qataris have said themselves they have been shocked by the reporting that we've done and have made a number of assurances that they mean very well with the World Cup and that they intend it to be a moment in which the country shows the best of itself. I mean, there are, of course, concerns that those words need to be turned into action, and there's growing pressure on the Qatari government and its leadership to act on this, not least from the football authorities.

And there's a sense that next week when FIFA meets in Zurich, this is certainly going to be on their agenda, and they will have to do some careful thinking about how they ensure that the world community but also the football community is happy that the stadiums where the world's best players are going to be playing are not being built over the bodies, essentially, of workers.

SIEGEL: Mr. Booth, thank you very much for talking with us.

BOOTH: Thanks very much. You're welcome.

SIEGEL: That's senior reporter Robert Booth of the Guardian. He was talking about the paper's report on the high number of construction worker deaths forecast in Qatar as that country prepares for the World Cup in 2022. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.