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Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

https://gctpnews.org/qatar-2022-world-cup-death-toll/

"The name of the current [migrant worker employment] system is kafala, a system forcing all migrants to be sponsored and subsequently tied to an employer. The kafala system has been frequently described as modern day slavery due to its exploitative nature. This employer controls housing, wages, travel, and the well being of each employee."

"[...] an estimated 4,000 migrant workers will die, making this event the deadliest in sporting history."

90% of Qatar's population and 94% of its workforce are foreign workers.

View on HN

Qatar is a terrible place, but I'm not sure the math checks out in that article.

Google tells me that the population of Qatar is 2.881 million. If 90% of that is foreign workers, that's 2.593 million foreign workers.

The timespan for those 4000 deaths in your link is not given. I'd guess it is over several years since the construction projects for the World Cup are taking place over several years, but let's put them all in one year just to make sure we aren't giving Qatar the benefit of the doubt. I'm also going to assume that most of the workers are young but not children.

4000 deaths among 2.593 million people in a year is a death rate of 154 per 100k per year.

For comparison, the death rates in the US [1] for males ages 15-24 is 100 per 100k per year, and for ages 25-34 it is 177 per 100k per year.

Without more to go on, it looks like the 4000 deaths might just be about the normal number of deaths one would expect in a group that large.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241572/death-rate-by-age...

Thanks for scrutinizing the numbers.

tl;dr: It could be that the fatality estimates aren't well made; supporting the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, however, supports well-documented abusive work conditions of foreign workers.

I've tried to dig up some sources on the numbers.

The 4000 deaths estimate was originally made in the ITUC Special Report [1] from 2013-2014, based on how many foreign workers from certain countries where numbers were available. This report mentions "These cases documented by our legal team, show the serious abuses of 1.4 million migrant workers in Qatar."

I don't know if they mean that only 1.4 million of 2.6 million migrant workers are abused, or if they assume different base numbers. I also don't know how they reach the number 4000, but on page 15 of the report you can see that they claim that this number is connected to the construction of the one dozen stadiums for the world cup, since they compare the number 4000 to numbers for similar sporting events in the past where fatalities range 0-40. (0 is London in 2012, 40 is Athens in 2004.)

The report does not spend a lot of time justifying the 4000 deaths estimate, but a Washington Post article from 2015 [3] mentions another report from 2015 by Engineers Against Poverty [2] (404s, fetched from archive.org) that reads:

> Overall, a report commissioned by the Qatari government shows 964 deaths of migrants from India, Nepal and Bangladesh in 2012 and 2013.

Subsequently, the number 4000 was controversial and was estimated both as high as 6500 in 2021 [4] (still only for certain countries where numbers were available), and as low as 3 if you ask FIFA.

Interestingly, BBC was thrown in jail for reporting on this. [5] Can't have all those fake news.

Maybe you're right and there isn't an unusual amount of deaths in Qatar. Maybe there is, and the numbers don't add up. Maybe they don't add up because they're super imprecise, and maybe they don't because they didn't account for statistical factors such as average deaths in construction work world-wide.

[1]: https://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/the_case_against_qatar_en_w... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20151024015052/http://www.engine... [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/27/a-bod... [4]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r... [5]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32775563

The gulf states are modern-day slave societies.

And why don't we in the west sanction them or refuse to trade with them for this practice? Not only that but we're actively supporting these regimes and selling them cutting edge weapons. Why is that?

'checks notes'

Oh, right, oil.

> And why don't we in the west sanction them or refuse to trade with them for this practice?

I wish we would. Possibly the one good thing coming out of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a realization that depending on oil and gas leaves you very vulnerable and that alternative sources of energy must become more common.

There will always be a dependency on resources or products from other countries - especially if we truly respect the rights of self-determination of arbitrarily small nations and city-states. True sovereignty of these states also means that they have the right to not trade with us for any reason, does it not?

There will also always be disagreements on fundamental ethical issues between countries. Even between the states in the US you can see such disagreements.

What we seem to lack is a principle for dealing with such situations. Instead, ad-hoc, inconsistent measures tend to be taken. It seems like if the true principle guiding such decisions were publicly announced, the general public would find it unpalatable. Are we living in willful denial?

Can such a principle then exist, that would both be consistent with our declared values, without compromising our ability to survive and defend ourselves and act according to it?

Most countries on earth simply cease to function as they are doing now with alternative eco-friendly energy sources.

Applying alternative energy sources where it doesn't make sense to do so ends up throwing billions of dollars on having solar panels where they can never generate the energy they theoretically could (Germany, I'm looking at you)

I do not know, whether this is true, but: When I was in school, we learned in geography class, that one could power the whole EU, if we occupied some area of the Sahara desert with solar panels, at least when looking at raw energy output, disregarding day night differences and possibly hot and cold environment that a desert is.

I guess humanity is still not ready for such projects of enormous cooperation between countries, or, that there are too many things in the way, like said temperature rise at day and fall at night, the vast distance the energy would need to be transported (is that a problem?) and maintenance work somewhere in the desert. One can still hope, that some day we will be able to think globally and solve problems that way.

> we learned in geography class, that one could power the whole EU, if we occupied some area of the Sahara desert with solar panels

I sometimes hear that too. The YouTube channel "Real Engineering" did a video about the idea: [1] The TLDR is: the Sahara definitely gets enough sun, but transmitting the power into Europe would be hard.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o

In the long term, most countries on earth will not be able to function as they are now if they don't switch to alternative energy sources.

This will involve a mix of wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and nuclear on grids that span continents with massive battery stores to balance supply with demand. Between climate change and petroleum-fuelled kleptocrats, ditching fossil fuels is a necessity, not a choice. And the long term here is on the order of decades, not centuries, so within most of our our lifetimes.

On the contrary, what many people in the West are realizing, is that abstaining from oil and gas leaves you poor or broke.

< in poor taste, feel free to delete @dang >

What?

Is it poor taste? I certainly have never had any issue complaining. It's widely reporter on in sports journalism, and the BBC etc.

Probably talking about their own comment, pre-edit to current version.

I was referring the original pre-edit although I can't remember what it actually said.

Well we could produce it all locally instead of having the president begging them to pump more

We do, effectively.

North America produces enough petroleum today to meet its own needs[1]. But the rest of the world doesn't, middle east oil is cheap relative to offshore or (especially) fracked petroleum, and at the end of the day fuels are a fungible commodity and our local prices reflect demand in the rest of the world.

The bit about "dependence on foreign oil" you're hearing is largely spin. Supply is not the problem. Pump more and we'll just use more.

[1] Which is not to say we don't import or export any. Markets are markets.

I'm of the impression that we can't use our own oil because our refineries largely aren't equipped to process it (different kinds of oil require different kinds of refineries, which is to say oil sort of isn't fungible), but rather our refineries are equipped to process foreign oil. So we can pump to our heart's content, but without the refineries we aren't able to use that oil.

I mean, someone is using it.

Everything is about cost. Back in the 90's, we couldn't get to our fracked oil because our existing equipment wasn't able to extract it. Then prices spiked and it made sense to build/invent new equipment. Refineries are changing too, to accommodate the state of the market they serve.

The bottom line is that "we" (in the sense the upthread poster meant) have plenty of oil. We pump plenty of oil. People saying we need to pump more oil are ultimately just reflecting the desires of companies who want to pump (and sell!) more oil and not the putative nativist needs of "our" oil consumers.

The bottom line is that no matter what the US does, oil prices are on a steady, inexorable rise[1] as the world exhausts its cheap supplies and needs to transition to difficult sources (again, fracking is the poster child here). Everything else is just crony politics.

[1] Though at this very moment they're experiencing an external shock due mostly to the war in Ukraine.

It’s actually the opposite: our refineries are great at processing shale, and Texas is the best place to deal with Albertan shale oil as well (hence why they wanted keystone XL so badly). We also have enough clean crude that can mix with heavier dirtier crude to enable that to be processed (so Venezuela had to import American oil to process their own). The oil industry is weird.

One thing is that shale oil is expensive to extract and refine. It wasn’t until recently when prices rose again that it became profitable.

Yeah our willingness to sanction Russia and all their oil, plunging europe into shortages kinda falsifies that theory. I wonder what the actual reason is :)

You mean everything but their oil?

I have the privilege to come into contact with migrants. I have seen things that should not happen in a wealthy European country.

Everything the media writes about Quatar I know is going on right here. The outrage is minimal. As long as desperation for money exists someone will exploit it.

The major difference you left out is scale...

As are the "Western" states; we just mostly keep our slaves in Asia, America, and South America, for efficiency.

I sort of agree on Asia--we shamefully send a lot of our manufacturing over there to exploit their lack of labor or environmental protections, but I don't think the west exploits South American labor to a particularly high degree? And the US doesn't have anything that could reasonably be called "slavery" (I suspect you're conflating poverty or incarceration with slavery, but those are different things).

What I love is that institutions like universities will happily link arms with Qatar for the $$$, despite the neo-slavery: https://www.qatar.northwestern.edu. Really puts their woke messaging at home in context.

“Institutions” in general don’t have woke messaging, specific institutions do. “Universities” in general don’t have partnerships with the Qatar government, specific universities do.

Just because one university is very “woke”, and another university forms a partnership with Qatar does not mean that universities in general are hypocritical, or even that any specific university is hypocritical.

If you are going to make such a broad argument as “American universities are hypocritically supporting the Qarar government” as you seem to be, you need to give more examples than just one university forming a partnership with Qatar.

Is NorthWestern not very woke? Isn't that the campus that launched multiple Title IX inquisition against a law professor on the basis that the law professor criticized Title IX?

> Kipnis was the subject of yet another Northwestern Title IX investigation earlier this year — this time for writing “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus,” a book about being investigated for saying there are too many Title IX investigations.

https://www.thefire.org/breaking-laura-kipnis-second-title-i...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/laura-kipniss-endle...

It doesn't have to be a case of a university signalling to the world that they are embarking on a formal partnership with government of Qatar, it just needs to be one of many indirect mechanisms through which they take a large amount of money that originates from Qatar, and a department or scholar or research foundation or a commercial partnership confers kudos upon a Qatari foundation or the royal family, or indicates patronage. There are a million ways of dressing it up, universities have PR departments and strategic communications consultancies to keep bad news at bay, and few students or academics are going to go to all that trouble to bite the hand that feeds them. You just end up with a state of the art new department building or facility that has been funded by a foundation with an Arabic name (perhaps an Emir or a sheikh's wife or daughter), and some dignitaries attending an opening ceremony on a Saturday morning to a hand-picked crowd while most of the students on campus are sleeping in. None of this is at all remarkable in today's landscape of intense inter-university competition. Also, they're not going to fund sociology departments; it's often directed towards the hard sciences or Arabic language/literature/history/cultural studies. And that's before you get onto endowments from Blue Chip companies that are actually vehicles for wealthy investors.

I’m thinking of a specific school that has a prominent, and very liberal, journalism school that has deep ties with Qatar: https://freebeacon.com/national-security/inside-qatars-multi...

I’m not getting involved in the debate over what’s a “woke” university and what isn’t (partly because everyone’s definition is different), but here is a non-exhaustive list of American universities partnered with Qatar:

- Northwestern University

- Cornell University

- Carnegie Mellon University

- Georgetown University

- Texas A&M University

- Virginia Commonwealth University

That’s just the ones I know of in Qatar, there’s also a bunch more in other gulf region countries (like the UAE).

Lol it’s also every single company ever. Look at the US/Western twitter accounts of major corporations and they’re all rainbows. Then look at their Middle East or other regions twitter accounts.. the only color they care about is green. Everything else is marketing backed by legal.

I was selected for a project in a Gulf country and we had a preliminary session where I got an eye opener. Basically, no women or gays, no non Islam religious paraphernalia, no atheists, no Jews and if you have Israeli stamp the company would help you get a new passport, no drinking, cover up tattoos. Never noped the fuck outta something as fast as declining that project. No money is worth working for these savage nations.

It’s gross how much these corporations act woke in the west and then basically bend to these kinds of countries. Disgusting, and yet everyone in the west eats up the marketing propaganda.

> the only color they care about is green.

As it should be. Corporations should not have many opinions and should operate within the law. If corporate leaders or employees don’t like it then they can spend their free time lobbying or campaigning for politicians that want to change things. Only after the law is changed should the company make a change. Until then, business as usual.

> Corporations should not have many opinions

I'm curious where this view comes from. The last time I checked, corporations are composed of people, and people are fraught with opinion.

I respectfully disagree. A company is just a group of people, and thus, it has common goals and opinions, like any other group of people.

> As it should be. Corporations should not have many opinions and should operate within the law.

Corporations should operate within the confines of non-discrimination law. If these business opportunities aren’t open to their Jewish or female employees, they are partaking in discrimination.

some real IBM in the 1930s energy here

IMO this is a terrible take on what companies should be doing. "Unless there's a law against it we should be doing it" is not how people who make up a corporation should be thinking.

Corporations should not have many opinions and should operate within the law.

Until we start crucifying corporate lobbyists in the public square, mass criticism is the only weapon we have.

"Corporations should not have many opinions and should operate within the law."

That would almost be ok if corporations weren't allowed to lobby the government, have their employees, owners or board members go work in politics or have other types of influence on politicians.

But they have tremendous influence on the laws that they themselves ostensibly have to follow.

Not to mention that:

- even when they break laws they tend to get just a slap on the wrist

- the corporate execs responsible for the lawbreaking rarely go to jail

- even if they're unlucky enough to go to jail the jails tend to be cushy country clubs

- execs have golden parachutes that let them cash out even if they screw the company, and can easily get jobs elsewhere (not that the people at the top who bear ultimate responsibility for the company even have to work another day in their life)

- corporations manipulate voters' opinions through (perfectly legal) advertising, PR, media ownership/influence, sponsorship, greenwashing, astroturfing, etc

Weird take in a forum for an industry built on “disruption”

This implies that one should set aside moral values when joining a corporation, and that laws can and should enforce morality. Both of those propositions are dubious.

We had a project in a relatively modernized Islamic country, and all the women were basically ripped off the project right before go-live.

Men were sent to the country in their stead, and had to pretend they were the ones responsible for building the thing.

The women were told it was for their safety, but the rumor was that a week before we were set to travel, the customer had apparently said, "by the way, we don't do business with women."

Same idea as for the environment.

For many institutions, the idea of being green is to dump their crap in other countries. So much that in many cases, it is better for the environment to put plastics in the regular trash to end up in a proper landfill rather than in the oceans by unscrupulous "recyclers" in countries where regulations are conveniently not enforced.

China used to be one of these dumpster countries, but now, they start caring a bit about the environment, which is a good thing, but there are still plenty of poor countries accepting our trash only to dump it in the oceans or in nature.

An institution has more than one person with more than one personality in it? Weird!

Yeah, how stupid are they for trying to be better than the Qatari government. What a bunch of dopes.

Early 2021 numbers suggest 6500 had died by then.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r...

Those numbers make no sense at all, as previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930117

In fact, if we take them at a face value, they suggest incredibly low death rates among immigrant workers in Qatar.

I read the discussion you linked and then calculated a bit and compared with my country. Turns out as you say, that this number isn't very high if it's all-cause mortality.

I don't think it's disputed though that migrant workers are treated inhumanely there. Not that Qatar would be the only community to treat migrant workers as second class people. It seems to be a case of a newspaper resorting to touting some numbers to make a point instead of reporting good information, which is sad.

sad but very very normal, unfortunately.

Talking about companies eschewing ethics to get at the money: newspapers are companies.

It is not about the Kafala system, since even the West has similar systems. It is that they treat migrant workers that are not highly skilled specially from specific backgrounds bad.

In Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, and elsewhere in the region migrant workers have their passport taken by the employer and thus can’t leave the country. They are stuck. In most other countries the employer does not confiscate your passport. It’s weird to me that one needs a passport to leave a country. In the U.S. you don’t need a passport to leave.

you still need the passport to enter anywhere else, even your home country

>you still need the passport to enter anywhere else, even your home country

Your home country can't refuse you entry, regardless of identification. Deportees don't get to stay in the US just because they lost their passport.

They can (and often do, at least for deportations from the UK) demand to see evidence that the deportee is, in fact, one of their citizens. Which can be difficult to prove without a passport. We have people who have been in immigration detention for years because they won't cooperate in getting an emergency travel document, or their 'home' country doesn't accept that they have a right of admission there.

A passport will allow you to go from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world and its usually hard to get.

"An emergency travelling document" will allow you to go from anywhere in the world to ONLY your home country and its usually easier to get.

Makes me think that the home countries are fairly complicit. Any country with robust consular services wouldn’t allow that to happen.

The US state department is happy to let governments know that US passports are property of the US government and may only be held under very limited circumstances. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/51.7#:~:text=CFR-,%C....

That's not legal, and it doesn't happen in cases of the kind of workers you are talking about. Taking passport or treating to be accused of rape and similar things happen (not commonly) to domestic workers and drivers. In occasions they buy the right of Kafala from the Kafil for a couple of $1000s and you leaving before your contract ends feel to them like a loss of money, I would say the situation here is indeed similar to slavery. For industry workers, every worker is replaceable and the company hiring you has 0 incentive to force you to stay.

The real issue in gulf is not paying livable wages mainly. Anything else is comparable to farm workers in Europe.

According to the following link confiscating of passports is common in Bahrain for migrant workers.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2012/09/30/bahrain-abuse-migrant-wo...

If you’ve ever been to a GCC country, you’ll notice that passport control when leaving is extremely long. It’s filled with South Asian men (and some women) who are put through the ringer by the officials and often pulled aside for extra questioning before being able to board a flight. They all seem to be on pins and needles

It is in fact illegal to confiscate for a private entity to confiscate a passport in most Western countries.

Unfortunately it's not well policed, many hotels and office receptions try to do so when they issue you a badge but I always refuse.

It's not just migrant workers thought, my one cousin who is a white collar worker, making significantly more than me, lived under similar conditions with respect to passport and living...they even go through his mail. I have had other cousins in the are who have worked as labourers and the first hand accounts as bad as we've heard.

That makes your cousin a migrant worker too? no?

Like Blacks and Mexicans in US?

Like North African farm workers in France.

No, the West does not have similar systems. There is plenty of injustice in the Western treatment of immigrant workers, but it's nowhere close to the outright slavery taking place in the Saudi peninsula. To point out injustice in the West is fair, but to use that to excuse the level of injustice in Qatar is delusional.

> a system forcing all migrants to be sponsored and subsequently tied to an employer

So, like an H1B?

H1B sponsors don’t hold your passport.

H1B visas have a similar effect of promoting longer employments and lower wages compared to the local workforce with regular liberty.

"similar effect"s are not relevant here. H1B are free to go back to their home country at will.

That assumes a lot of things that aren't true of the H1B holders I've met through work.

I am on H1B and know tons and tons of people who are on it. you can absolutely pack your bags and leave the very same day if you wish.

Do you mean financially they aren't able to? To me that's a different situation than literally not allowed to leave by your employer, because they won't return your passport.

I’ve always wondered, what does “holding a passport” entail? Can’t you just go to your embassy and make a new passport as if you’ve lost the old one? How can some other guy holding your documents make you a slave unable to leave if you want?

Another poster in this thread suggested¹ that there must be some degree of collusion with the migrant worker’s home state(s) for this practice to be widespread.

It’s possible that if they try to obtain a new password from their embassy or consul that they’re told they should retrieve their original one from their “employer”. They may have to prove it was lost or stolen by filling out an official police form – which would likely be a criminal offence if done so knowing that the passport was not lost. This is all conjecture: I’m imagining how there could be rules that appear to be fair on the surface but are actually enforced in such a way as to unfairly restrict the human rights/freedom of the worker.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834976

> The name of the current [migrant worker employment] system is kafala, a system forcing all migrants to be sponsored and subsequently tied to an employer.

Isn’t that exactly like how the L1/H1B system in US work? Employer sponsoring and being tied to the employer till the lottery?

Even worse in China. They will hold your passport and force you to stay in dorms.

It's a significant difference of degree. First of all H1B visa holders are not close to 90% of the US population, nor are they exploited to the degree that migrant workers are in Qatar (look at the death rates of those workers compared with US H1B visa holders). Similarly, the US doesn't allow H1B companies to take custody of the worker's passport, thereby locking them in the country. We should reform our H1B system, but these two things aren't particularly comparable.

The far more important question is why our authorities have been totally willing to subject potentially countless of our citizens to arbitrary and unlawful imprisonment?

Every games for fairly obvious reasons has been shagtastic.

We shouldn't go.

Edit"countless" because you might not need to count just assume everyone single will be arrested. I don't dare look up their laws pertaining to LGBTQ+ folks.

Edit2: add in installed NSO and other deep inspection wares plus terrorist motivations internally against their state (for much the same objections natch) and we're going through'72 again.

>"[...] an estimated 4,000 migrant workers will die, making this event the deadliest in sporting history."

This is a silly fabrication, as discussed before in another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930117

Not sure why this circlejerk is so popular on HN, the facts do not support it in the slightest.

The comment you linked has an extremely narrow focus, on proven deaths during the building phase. There's all sorts of related problems like kidney illness that will kill many of those workers due to the terrible conditions; https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/qatar-2022-dying-for-the-...

You’ve misread what I linked. None of the numbers being discussed are “proven deaths during the building phase” as you claim.

All of these numbers are supposed to reflect overall mortality among immigrant workers, but they’re actually far too low to be accurate.

> "[...] an estimated 4,000 migrant workers will die, making this event the deadliest in sporting history."

Some sources say 400,000 gladiators died in the arenas in ancient Rome. It was during multiple events of course, but that number does not include deaths of constructions workers.

Not trying to make any excuses for Qatar, but "deadlies" seems to be exaggerated.

UAE had the most vaccinated people. Except they only counted citizens, foreign workers didn't count. I suspect Qutar did something similar.

I got vaccinated in UAE with a low-skill worker visa, no issues.

Is 4000 people dying per decade a lot?

Qatar has over 2m migrant workers.

In 12 years, 6500 have died. 550/2m/yr .27/1000/yr

In USA the rate for age 20-30 is about 1/1000/yr.

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