Qatar plans on hosting the World Cup of soccer in 2022. An event of this magnitude requires a lot of planning and building of an infrastructure to handle the amount of people that will be coming to view the games. Qatar has been working on building the facilities since 2012, and in that time, more than 900 migrant have lost their lives on the job. A recent report from the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) says that, if conditions do not improve, at least 4,000 workers will die on the job.
The amount of workers who have died sounds shocking, but when compared to the casualty numbers from other large work projects in the past, it is simply staggering. In preparation for the recent Winter Olympics in Sochi, only 25 workers lost their lives. Brazil, who is hosting the World Cup in 2014, has only lost six workers. The fact that 900 workers have already died in Qatar and work isn’t even close to being finished shows that something is seriously wrong in Qatar.
There are currently 1.2 million migrant workers in Qatar right now working in deplorable conditions on the World Cup facilities. They are living in overcrowded barracks and sickness is spreading fast through the tight quarters. There are some reports of workers being denied everything from their wages, to clean drinking water. With more than one million more workers expected to come to Qatar to work before the World Cup, the problem will only get worse. That is why Fifa needs to take action and take it soon. They should threaten to hold the World Cup somewhere else unless Qatar can fix the things they have done wrong and provide a safe work environment for the workers.