(I want to be clear I'm not making any judgments as to what UEFA or any other clubs should do)
Qatar uses the same migrant worker system as most other gulf countries do, including Kuwait. When US used the ally nation as a place to organize operations into Iraq they cut themselves a piece of the action. Doing the same thing for the war effort as Qatar is doing for the World Cup. I've been trying to draw attention to this (not just here) but especially in the outside world but very few people seem to notice or care. Then when the western media finally began to report on the conditions of the migrant workers, it was because of Qatar. Then I started seeing long threads bashing Qatar over this.
<snip>
Over the past decade, the U.S. military has outsourced its overseas base-support responsibilities to private contractors, which have filled the lowest-paying jobs on military bases with third-country nationals, migrant workers who are neither U.S. citizens nor locals. As of January 2014, there were 37,182 third-country nationals working on bases in the U.S. Central Command region, which includes Afghanistan and Iraq — outnumbering both American and local contract workers.
These laborers do the cooking, cleaning, laundry, construction and other support tasks necessary to operate military facilities. In Afghanistan they primarily come from India and Nepal and are employed by subcontractors for one of two large American companies, Fluor Corp. and Dyncorp International, which manage U.S. bases in Afghanistan under the Department of Defense’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program. Dozens of subcontracting companies, mostly headquartered in the Persian Gulf, work on Fluor and Dyncorp contracts.
South Asian workers are at the bottom of the social hierarchy on U.S. bases. They earn far less than American or European contractors, work 12-hour days with little or no time off and, on some bases, aren’t allowed to use cellphones or speak to military personnel. On the base we visited, Camp Marmal, most were surprised and nervous when we approached them, concerned that talking to journalists could get them in trouble. One young man’s face contorted in terror when asked whether he had paid a recruiting fee. He shook his head no, fearful of any reprisals. “To come here, you have to use an agent,” another worker told us. “There is no other way. So we pay money to come.”
An agent is a person from a recruitment agency hired to find laborers for a company — in this case, the subcontractor. Sindhu Kavinamannil, a certified fraud examiner who has investigated labor networks between India and the Middle East, says there are tens of thousands of recruitment agencies in India and Nepal, the majority of them unregistered. They might be headquartered in large cities, she adds, but they each have hundreds of agents and subagents spread out across small towns and villages.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/7/after-12-years-ofwarlaborabusesrampantonusbasesinafghanistan.html
The article has a caption "The U.S. government has been aware of inequities and violations in the military contracting system for years."
It is true because I knew about it for years -- http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4322511
As I mention in the thread I posted that pretty much all articles neglect is they did most of the transportating of supplies. A military convoy has 5 up-armored truck-trailers, 3 gun truck humvees, 2 bobtails (incase a truck is disabled so they can hall a trailer), and about 25 TCNs driving fiberglass vehicles with no armor or weapon into war zones.
Invisible and Indispensable Army of Low-Paid Workers
This mostly invisible, but indispensable army of low-paid workers has helped set new records for the largest civilian workforce ever hired in support of a U.S. war. They may be the most significant factor to the Pentagon’s argument that privatizing military support services is far more cost-efficient for the U.S. taxpayer than using its own troops to maintain camps and feed its ranks.
But American contractors returning home frequently share horrible tales of the working and living conditions that these TCNs endure on a daily basis.
TCNs frequently sleep in crowded trailers, wait outside in line in 100 degree heat to eat “slop,” lack adequate medical care and work almost every waking hour seven days a week for little or no overtime pay. Frequently, the workers lack proper safety equipment for hard labor
And when insurgents fire incoming mortars and rockets at the sprawling military camps, American contractors slip on helmets and bulletproof vests, but TCNs are frequently shielded by only the shirts on their backs and the flimsy trailers they sleep in.
<snip>
Many are killed in mortar attacks; some are shot. Others have been taken hostage before meeting their death. In particularly gruesome set of murders on August 30, 2004, the captors of 12 Nepalese cooks and cleaners working for a Jordanian construction company beheaded one worker and posted a video of the execution on the internet with the message: "We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalese who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians . . . believing in Buddha as their God."
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12675
Qatar has other factors that should probably eliminate themselves, I agree. Like I said, I'm not making any judgments over what individual clubs feel they should do.
More
The abuse and exploitation endured by migrant workers, however, is not just evidence of privatization run amok: It is also symptomatic of these workers’ political utility to Washington. In Iraq and Afghanistan, TCNs have often outnumbered the contingents of close US allies, yet they don’t factor in to the politically sensitive troop figures that drive much of the Beltway conversation. As for the deaths and injuries that TCNs suffer, no one seems to be counting them, at least not systematically. At the same time, because migrants are easily deported, they present less of a challenge to manage than locals, whom the US views as potential infiltrators working with insurgents.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, the plight of these migrants mirrors that of detainees in Guantánamo and other extraterritorial prisons in the “global war on terror.” These prisoners are outside the reach of most US domestic courts, thousands of miles away from their families and detained in places where they have little chance of laying claim to local sympathy. The US prefers to keep prisoners and workers in a legally ambiguous space and status, disconnected from the public, whether in the US, the countries where they find themselves or their homelands.
http://www.merip.org/new-documentary-us-militarys-migrant-workers
= new reply since forum marked as read
