For families whose loved ones died on the job in the pre-tournament construction boom, questions remain for Qatar and FIFA about who gets redress and who doesn’t
When Tul Bahadur Gharti called his wife on May, 28, 2020, as he did every day before his shift on a building site in Qatar, he seemed fine. Before hanging up, he promised Bipana, back in Nepal, that he would phone her again the following morning. He never did.
At the same time, however, the ILO, a UN body, warned that “more needs to be done to fully apply and enforce the labour reforms,” and workers have complained that changes are often not felt on the ground, particularly on projects unrelated to the World Cup. “Unless FIFA and Qatar act, then the real ‘legacy’ of this tournament will be how FIFA, Qatar, and anyone profiting from this World Cup left families of thousands of migrant workers indebted after they died.”
Officials in Doha pushed back hard against that report, saying it conflated natural causes with employment-related deaths, but advocates say it is Qatar’s own statistics that are misleading, and the Guardian figures did not include deaths of workers from the Philippines or Kenya, two big sources of migrant labour.
While some local governments provide compensation to the families of migrant workers, this is rarely sufficient to cover the cost of losing a major breadwinner, as well as the debt many incurred to recruiters before leaving for Qatar. In 2017, Doha introduced a Universal Reimbursement Scheme, requiring contractors to prove workers did not pay recruitment fees, or reimburse them if they did.
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