The suits went off and the jeans were pulled from the hotel closet. Secretary-General Gijs de Jong of the Dutch football association KNVB was already in Qatar a year ago. There was a formal program – meetings with the World Cup organization, Qatari ministries, Amnesty International, among others. But also an evening when other clothes were appropriate. Then De Jong, together with representatives of other football associations, spoke for half an evening with migrant workers who worked in Qatar.
The meeting was organized by the organization Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI). This is a sister organization of the Dutch trade union FNV, and has been active in Qatar for years to improve the situation of migrant workers. The football associations of Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and England were also there. That evening, fifteen migrant workers who worked in various sectors were interviewed. It got De Jong thinking, he would explain afterwards. “It indicated that the situation is more complex than many people think,” De Jong wrote in a statement.
Read also: this research story from NRC about the workers who worked on the stadiums where the Dutch play. About dead, injured and shadows in the desert state
For example, there had been a domestic help who, like many, was treated badly – and hardly anyone in Qatar had any insight into this, because the work is done indoors with (more affluent) families. De Jong also heard stories about companies that did not follow or even opposed new labor legislation – higher minimum wage, free change of employer, no longer working during the hottest hours of the day. But the migrants also said that the World Cup had improved their lives enormously. Many made more money through the new laws, and they often had more freedom. That would never have happened without the World Cup, they thought. “They see the World Cup as part of the solution,” said De Jong.
Three pillars
This is how the KNVB would like to see the tournament and focuses on three pillars: enforcement of new laws, participation of workers, continuing to draw attention to the problems in Qatar. The latter is the main reason behind the PR moment that the Dutch national team is organizing this Thursday after the public training session. Twenty migrant workers have been invited to the training field in Doha to talk to Orange internationals and kick a ball. The KNVB took the initiative, the world football association FIFA supports the action. “With all the media that come to the training, you grab a big stage. That is exactly what human rights organizations asked of the unions: use the attention for the World Cup to improve the situation of the migrant workers,” says a KNVB spokesperson.
As with Gijs de Jong’s meeting, the workers are “good acquaintances” of the BWI trade union – so the KNVB knows that their experiences are authentic. Human rights organization Amnesty also says that it is therefore confident “that Orange will not be confronted with a few model workers selected by Qatar.”
According to the KNVB, it was an “express wish of the players” that the migrants had actually worked on World Cup stadiums. That is logical on the one hand, because there have also been deaths and injuries on construction sites of World Cup stadiums. On the other hand, the World Cup construction sites were known for meeting higher standards than other construction projects in Qatar. Ambet Yuson, secretary general of BWI, commenting on the KNVB website: “Unfortunately, with few exceptions, the same vigilance is not being shown outside the World Cup venues. Employers continue to defy the law and violate human rights of migrant workers, often with impunity.”
BWI employees will also be present at the training field on Thursday. That’s no surprise. The KNVB follows the approach of this organization, so to speak: more pragmatic than activist. BWI has been in Qatar since 2013 to improve the situation of guest workers (90 percent of the inhabitants in Qatar are migrant workers). It is largely thanks to this organization, together with human rights organizations and the UN organization ILO, that many reforms have been implemented.
For example, BWI filed a complaint against FIFA, because international guidelines of the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) were not followed in the construction of World Cup facilities. BWI was right. An agreement was also signed with the Supreme Committee, the organization of the World Cup in Qatar. As a result, BWI was allowed to carry out safety inspections on construction sites, among other things. Since then, companies can be blacklisted if they make people work in the heat or do not have their safety procedures in order.
Not the worst stories
The fact that the Orange internationals will therefore speak to workers who worked on the stadiums will mean that it is not expected that the most harrowing stories will be heard. These are the stories of widows and children who lost their father in Qatar. Who live in Nepal, Bangladesh and India and received an obituary out of the blue. They had to pick up a simple wooden coffin at the airport, without it being clear exactly what happened to their loved ones. Qatar categorically refuses to investigate how migrant workers die, which means that their next of kin are rarely entitled to compensation.
Estimates of the number of deaths range from three (Qatar and FIFA), to 6,500 (research by The Guardian), up to 17,000 (Statistics Office of Qatar). All those numbers have shortcomings. Three: that only concerns people who died on construction sites of World Cup stadiums, and is almost certainly a serious underestimate. 6,500: this concerns all migrant workers from a select group of countries who died in the desert state between 2010 (World Cup allocation to Qatar) and 2020, it being unclear whether they were working on a World Cup project. 17,000: all non-Qatarians who died since 2010. The fact that there is so much uncertainty about those figures is because Qatar refuses to investigate causes of death. And that is precisely what activist clubs such as Amnesty International are so angry about.
Where the activist and pragmatic organizations, including the KNVB, find each other in any case, the following requirement is: there must be a compensation fund of 440 million euros (equal to the prize money during this World Cup) to compensate deceased and injured workers and their loved ones . Qatar refuses to cooperate. FIFA has promised to think along, but has been silent about it in recent weeks.
Extra pressure on FIFA
Training with migrant workers is also important for the KNVB for this reason; it puts additional pressure on FIFA. The Dutch football association is supported by, among others, Belgium, Denmark, England, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Wales – together they form the UEFA working group for labor and human rights. A group of American internationals played earlier this week a party with a number of migrant workers, but the KNVB is also not supported by many unions. If you look honestly at all World Cup participants, you cannot fail to notice that in most countries the situation of guest workers in Qatar is not a topic of discussion at all.
That makes the training more than the “show” that national coach Louis van Gaal talked about last week, because it is true that the Netherlands sticks its neck out. This will certainly stand out internationally and receive a lot of attention. At the same time, there is a chance that it will indeed remain a PR moment, without consequences, because the question is whether the hot breath on the neck of FIFA is more than a soft sigh from a few Western European countries.
For the Orange players, the human rights chapter is closed after Thursday. They then focus on the tournament, on football. It is striking how united the players are in the first days of the preparation about the situation. They think it’s terrible what happened to migrant workers in Qatar and want to do their best to speak up. But they also think that you cannot expect that it will always be the football players who speak out. For Louis van Gaal it is clear: one hour of attention for human rights. After that, “everything must be all about Senegal,” he said during a press conference for the World Cup. “We go there to play football.”