Critics of Qatar’s modern slavery in 2022 need to take a closer look at home

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LONDON, ENGLAND – NOVEMBER 20: BBC FIFA World Cup coverage on TV screens at Flat Iron Square… [+] on November 20, 2022 in London, England. The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 will kick off on October 20, 2022 with the tournament kicking off between Qatar and Ecuador after the opening ceremony at Al Bayt Stadium in Doha. (Photo by Hollie Adams/Getty Images)

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During his closing speech for the Qatar 2022 World Cup, FIFA President Gianni Infantino could not escape the dark clouds that have hung over the tournament since the day of his announcement.

Determined to focus on the positive, the football governing body boss walked into a media audience armed with a familiar phrase; it was the best World Cup ever.

The World Cup was an incredible success on all fronts, the president told reporters.

The main one being the fans, the behavior, the happy atmosphere, the bringing together of people. The fans meeting the Arab world, it was very important for all of our future.

Revenue also exploded, Infantino was proud to report, the $7.5 billion earned in the 2018-2022 cycle was a billion more than last time and even better is to come, the next four years should pay off. $11 billion.

But, as reporters are wont to do, he was asked uncomfortable questions that disrupted the narrative he had intended to tell.

Again, it was asked to clarify the number of workers who died in the creation of the tournament.

I think every person who dies is one too many. It’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy for the family, it’s a tragedy for everyone involved, he replied.

When talking about numbers, you always have to be very precise so as not to give the impression of something that is in fact something else.

As always, this response did little to quell the unease among large swaths of the Western media who did not shy away from telling stories about the plight of migrant workers during the tournament.

There was considerably less rage than there was in the opening speech when he talked about being bullied as a child for his red hair and accusing the West of hypocrisy, but it could hardly be described as well received.

Among the nations whose media have actively discussed the asterisk around proceedings in Qatar is Britain.

The BBC national broadcaster led the way early on, choosing to show a film about the issues that marred the competition rather than the opening ceremony and asked host Gary Lineker to deliver a monologue that called the most controversial World Cup in history.

Since FIFA chose Qatar in 2010, the smallest nation to host football’s biggest competition has faced big questions, he told viewers, accusations of corruption in the process of bidding for the treatment of migrant workers who built the stadiums, where many lost out. their lives.

This approach has divided opinion, with ever outspoken media personality Piers Morgan attacking the BBC’s decision on Twitter calling it outrageously disrespectful. [] guff signaling virtue.

If they are so appalled, they should take their vast army of employees home and spare us this senseless hypocrisy, he added.

While Morgan might have gone a bit far in his criticism of one of the world’s most influential media organizations, the extent to which certain sections of the press discovered an awareness of the plight of migrant workers during the launch of Qatar 2022 was infuriating.

As a journalist who has spent years investigating modern slavery and exploitation in British construction, hearing colleagues discuss these issues as if they were just discovered and do not exist in Britain is infuriating.

Modern slavery in the UK

LONDON, UK – OCTOBER 14: People march against modern slavery through London wearing… [+] face masks representing the silence of modern slaves in forced labor and sexual exploitation on October 14, 2017 in London, England. PHOTO BY Mathew Chattle/Future Publishing (Photo credit should read Mathew Chattle/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

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In April this year, the UK Anti-Slavery Commissioner published a report on the risks and drivers of labor exploitation in the construction sector.

The paper analyzes a single successful Metropolitan Police investigation, Operation Cardinas, which brought down an organized crime group whose slaves had worked in the supply chains of major construction projects in London and the south east of England for almost 10 years.

Cover the area at the time of the crimes. it was a case that I knew well and I attended a large part of the trial.

In many ways, Operation Cardinas was an exception, with modern slavery cases like this making it very difficult to get reliable witnesses. Workers who had been deprived of food, whose papers had been seized and forced to work without money were often terrified of cooperating with the authorities.

Strong anti-immigration sentiment in the UK has not helped, nor have tougher post-Brexit rules on migrant workers which, given crippling labor market shortages in construction, have boosted the market considerably. black.

Then there was the culture of secrecy around any findings relating to modern slavery on UK projects.

When people found the operating metrics, they often didn’t report them, because even at the top of organizations, the chief information officers were wrong.

During my reporting, I met the CEO of a billion dollar company who happily told members of the British Parliament during a select committee hearing that there was no modern slavery in their supply chain. I found out just three months earlier that a man hired for a project run by a subsidiary of CEOs had been convicted of modern slavery offences.

The Anti-Slavery Commissioners report found that Operation Cardinas found at least 33 companies paying for OCG modern slavery transactions ranging from $100,000 to $100,000.

According to the report’s investigators, this actually represented only a fraction of those who were affected by the gang.

Although I managed to find the names of some of the sites these people were working on, from 2,500 housing estates to high-end apartment buildings in London, neither the police nor the commissioner were willing to release the full list .

The report was completely ignored by the mainstream media and no questions were posed to industry or government.

But based on my investigations, I would say that the problem of slave labor in British construction is far bigger than anyone cares to admit.

Can Britain teach Qatar a lesson?

DOHA, QATAR – OCTOBER 23: Workers stand at the construction site of a new office building in the … [+] budding new financial district on October 23, 2011 in Doha, Qatar. Qatar will host the 2022 FIFA World Cup football competition and is expected to tackle various infrastructure projects including the construction of new stadiums. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

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It would be wrong to draw direct comparisons with Qatar, but given the number of years that Britain has built infrastructure similar to the set of projects delivered for the World Cup, the nation must examine itself before to lecture others about the exploitation of migrant workers.

It is admirable that journalists have continued to ask Infantino difficult questions about the terrible conditions faced by migrant workers, the question is why the equivalent leaders in the UK who deal with housing or infrastructure do not don’t twist the same way?

Yes, there is the fact that the Kafala system, which controls migrant workers in certain Middle Eastern countries, legitimizes practices that would be illegal in Britain.

But British journalists and media commentators have not put a fraction of the effort into examining the situation at home.

Accordingly, I would say that the majority of Britons are indifferent to the presence of modern slavery and that a significant part of the population accepts it.

The most popular slogan of the modern anti-slavery movement in the UK is that crime lurks in plain sight.

In other words, people constantly see evidence of modern slavery, they have their cars washed and their gardens cleaned by clearly exploited people, but fail to act.

If modern slavery is visible to British media in Qatar, it should also highlight its presence in the UK.

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