From its award to the opening ceremony, the World Cup to be held in Qatar in 2022 regularly feeds chronicles that have little to do with the game. Last twist: workers working on the stadium construction has not been paid for several months, or only partially, according to "Amnesty International". The Doha government has been regularly criticized for years for the working conditions of this immigrant workforce mainly from Southeast Asia.
Among them are a hundred workers from the company “Qatar Meta Coats” (QMC) working on the great Al-Bayt stadium, emblem of the local Bedouin culture with its tent-shaped architecture, who have not received any wages over a seven-month period, according to an Amnesty report released Wednesday. Some just received partial pay on June 7, the source said.
Government ensures problem is resolved
In its report, the human rights NGO affirms that “the problems encountered by QMC workers have been well known to the Ministry of Labor of Qatar and the body responsible for organizing the country's soccer World Cup since almost a year. But the compensation did not start until after Amnesty revealed the results of its investigation, "the organization added.
Workers from Asia and Africa told the NGO that the entire QMC workforce on the Al-Bayt site, which will host 60,000 people during the World Cup, was concerned: "Every day we ask them, but they tell us they are short of money," said one of the workers.
In a letter to the NGO, the Qatari organizers of the next World Cup confirmed that they had been informed of the non-payment of salaries in July 2019. "Since then, we have been working to find a solution," they say. In financial difficulty, QMC was banned from working on World Cup projects and was sold to new owners, according to the organizers.
The Qatari authorities have reportedly taken numerous social protection measures to protect workers, but their effectiveness on the ground has been questioned by NGOs. Rare workers' strikes and the attention of the international media have led the wealthy gas state to intervene on several occasions, paying the wages itself and initiating proceedings against the offending companies.