World Cup security staff suffer in the silence of Qatar’s broken promises, incl. co. comment
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Six months on from that most memorable of World Cup finals, Shakir Ullah has been forgotten. Ullah, from Pakistan, spent the tournament employed as a security guard but has now been in jail in Qatar for almost five months. He was detained in late January as he tried to resolve a dispute over unpaid wages on behalf of hundreds of his co-workers. The men were deployed to guard key sites during the World Cup but were suddenly laid off in the days after the final, with about three months on their contracts...
For years, Qatar and Fifa insisted things had changed for men such as Ullah and the hundreds of thousands of low-wage migrant workers who made the tournament possible. The World Cup would leave a lasting legacy of better workers’ rights in the country and the region, they claimed.
Today, those promises sound empty and instead of outrage that these men were cheated and deported or imprisoned, there is only silence…
In a statement, Fifa said: “Workers need to be free to raise their voices in line with their rights and freedoms under international standards and that due process must be guaranteed for anyone accused of wrongdoing.”...
The BWI said on the eve of the ILO conference it “presented the situation on the ground for thousands of migrant construction workers in Qatar...
The ITUC did not respond to requests for comment.