The unrelenting heat of Wednesday afternoon is enough to make anyone cringe for the people who are putting in their efforts to create the shining facade Qatar will display when it hosts its World Cup, which kicks off one year later.
Half-a dozen immigrants are working under the scorching sun to install stones pavements around Lusail Stadium. It is still unfinished, but they have begun.
We discuss their pay — £12 a day — and their daily lives. They will be boarding one of the dirty Tata buses, which have been chugging along this area for an hour, and return north to their camp.
Migrant workers in Qatar are being paid £12 for 11-hour days with the World Cup next year
The Lusail Stadium is the venue for 2022 World Cup Finals. However, it remains unfinished.
The men detail how they got all of this done. ‘So many pavements!’ says one of the men, Shikhar, gesturing to the bags of Al Tameer Cement and stone stacked up all around this building site. Most of Doha has been excavated.
There is one universal anxiety — their enforced leave from this place for five months, from next August, as the Gulf state presents its best face to the world. ‘The lieu,’ as these men all call it. It is believed that it will not be paid. They are usually philosophical and not complaining.
The fact they are exposed to the burning heat — scarves and rags wrapped around their faces and just one ‘rest area’ the size of a small bus stop — does not even enter the conversation.
It is a scene which speaks to the most inexplicable part of Qatar’s controversial World Cup: how a supposedly modern Gulf state which has spent billions on a 28-day competition intended to burnish its global reputation does not appreciate how terrible the treatment of these workers makes it look.
The workers’ exposure to the sun very much does matter. Amnesty International’s damning Reality Check report published on Tuesday on the state of migrant workers finds that ‘heat stress’ has posed ‘a huge risk to workers’ and caused an unquantifiable number of deaths.
This report details six cases of young migrants who died in this country. Suman Miah was a 34-year-old construction worker who collapsed and died last year after a long shift in temperatures that reached 100°F (38°C). Tul Bahadur Gharti, also 34, died in his sleep around the same time, after working outdoors for about 10 hours in heat of up to 102°F (39°C).
Un worker noted how many roads needed attention in order to prepare for 2022.
Workers are allowed to rest in designated areas, similar to a bus stop.
Sujan Miah, a 32-year-old found dead in bed by workmates, was a pipe fitter on a project in the desert working in temperatures exceeding 104°F (40°C).
Amnesty’s report describes how it is extremely difficult to get to the bottom of these cases, or to understand the contribution of heat, because vague death certificates explain them as ‘natural causes’ or ‘cardiac arrest’.
These descriptions are ‘almost meaningless in certifying deaths — and thus no connection to their working conditions is made’, the Amnesty report states. ‘As a result, bereaved families are denied the opportunity to know what happened to their loved ones. It also prevents these families from receiving compensation from employers or Qatari authorities.’
Dr David Bailey, a leading pathologist and member of the World Health Organisation working group on death certification, told Amnesty: ‘Essentially, everyone dies of respiratory or cardiac failure in the end and the phrases are meaningless without an explanation why.’
Though Amnesty’s work does not cover it, this sense of evasion also applies to the death of British worker Zac Cox at the Khalifa International Stadium in January 2017. The authorities announced in 2019 that a wide-ranging inquiry led by British former high court judge Sir Robert Akenhead would be held into Cox’s death. Since then, nothing has been reported about the case.
Zaccox, a British worker, was killed at Khalifa stadium (pictured) in January 2017.
The Amnesty report also finds that much-vaunted Qatari legislation supposedly bringing an end to the kafala system — which restricted migrant workers from leaving the country or changing jobs without their employer’s permission — is simply not working.
Conservative employers in Qatar are resisting attempts to grant workers this fundamental right. Old abuses are being resurfacing.
Workers have to present a ‘no objection’ certificate from their previous employer before they leave. This form is being sold to unscrupulous employers, who are making a large profit. If workers try to change their jobs, they will be charged with absconding.
Many people are present on the ground. SportsmailTalk about the inability to get a fraction of what you earn from derisory wages. ‘I’m an electrician and have skills but they won’t let me apply somewhere to use them,’ says Hamad, who is working as a general labourer to help lay a vast car park in front of the stadium.
It has been like this here for generations of immigrants, ever since an Asian workforce arrived for the construction boom which followed the development of the nation’s oilfields in the 1980s.
It was then, and still is, impossible for the small, indigenous population to build the infrastructure without these migrants. However, the high number of Qataris who are immigrants hasn’t encouraged an open mind. About 2.7million people live in the country, with 90 percent being foreigners.
Many immigrants work in gruelling heat throughout the day in order to complete stadiums such as the Education City Stadium (pictured) in time for next year’s tournament
‘Qataris are not simply a minority, they are a small minority,’ writes Michael Quentin Morton in his history of Qatar, Masters of the Pearl. ‘This has inevitably led to tensions among the kernel of citizens who feel vulnerable and resentful.’
With two recent major government appointments, there have been efforts to relocate the area from Dickensian Britain. Both Dr Ali al-Marri, Minister of Labour, and Maryam al-Misnad Minister of Social Development and Family are progressives.
A push is being made for Qataris to be employed in the private sector. Many of them work in government positions and have no input into the actual running of construction projects.
Progress is still slow. It is painfully slow to make progress with some workers.
‘Qatar deserves better’, is emblazoned on the boards which screen the property, retail and pavement developments which Doha is being dug up for. The wealthy Qataris seem to think that this motto is only applicable.
Shikhar described a quiet existence in a shared room with three other workers. They rotate in and out in shifts. He works 5pm to 4am as a fork-lift truck driver and earns £12 a day.
‘It’s not what I thought it would be here but the night work is precious,’ he says. ‘I work when it’s cooler. I’m not out in that heat.’