While the oil owners sit in their comfy homes and enjoy luxuries in hotels, the poor workers from Asia and Africa work in miserable conditions in Middle Eastern countries to provide for their families back in their home countries. Qatar is one of those oil-rich lands where hard-working laborers from many third-world countries serve the rich “masters”.
In August this year, Global Research published a report Slavery in Qatar pointing to the inhuman “Kafala” system of recruiting workers into Qatar’s labor force, nearly all of which is made of foreign laborers. Under the Kafala system of recruitment, a worker is kept tethered to the sponsor as the worker cannot leave the country, switch employer, obtain a driver’s license, or even rent a house without getting the sponsor’s consent. In plain words, workers are enslaved by their sponsors.
As Qatar looks forward to host the 2022 world cup of soccer, one piece of good new comes now from WalkFree.org which sent an upbeat message to subscribers and supporters today notifying that FIFA’s president Sepp Blatter has admitted widely existing abuse of migrant construction workers and the need for “fair working conditions with a lasting effect must be introduced quickly in Qatar”.
“The good news is that FIFA has now committed to working with the International Trade Union Confederation and the German Football Association to improve the unacceptable situation in Qatar,” conveys the message from WalkFree. To say thanks to FIFA for this initiative, WalkFree has created a Facebook image of thanks to FIFA, which can be shared by any user with others with a click.
Qatar is not the only rich country where this kind of slavery persists amidst cries for basic human rights of the workers. It will be probably hard to find a country where slavery does not exist in one form or another. But countries like Qatar need serious reforms in the labor force area – trending toward less labor and less force.
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