This number may mean nothing without context. At least 6,500 migrant workers have died, but how many exactly occurred due to the construction of new buildings for the World Cup?
The title of this post isn’t really honest. It says “at least 6,500 deaths constructing stadia for the World Cup” but the Guardian article is titled “6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since World Cup awarded”.
And yes, I’m aware of migrant abuse in Qatar and other relatively wealthy Middle Eastern countries…just want to set the facts straight
In comparable projects, the London Olympics in 2012 had 0 construction deaths associated and in more recent years, even the highest recorded count was 74 in Sochi, Russia.
Yeah, I was going to say; any construction deaths are frontpage news here. 6500 for a country the size of a shoe is insane, directly related to the the worldcup or not.
As I understand the GP, the point is that during the construction of the any sporting facilities, some workers will have died but it won't have been directly related to the work they did.
In Qatar, that number is >6500. In the UK, we don't know the number.
I can't imagine that many people dying on an engineering project anywhere else in Europe, unless perhaps there was a major incident like a tunnel collapse. But that would be headline news around the world.
I agree - there is probably a story here, but the writer didn't do a very good job connecting the dots, correlation is not causation, lazy journalism at its worst.
How is this for a headline?
"5,333 US workers died in the 12 months following Qatar withdrawing from OPEC"
or
"5,333 US Workers died in the 12 months following Austria legalizing same sex marriage"
I do believe that fact-checking and identifying clickbait is important, but in this case I think you are nitpicking with no cause and adding no substance to the discussion.
The article mentions a sum of 6,751 deaths not including several countries (Philippines and Kenya), so "at least 6,500" is correct. The article also says "While death records are not categorised by occupation or place of work, it is likely many workers who have died were employed on these World Cup infrastructure projects", so the "constructing stadia for the World Cup", although a bit loosely, is also true.
I don't get what you were trying to open our eyes to with your comment. Even if only 1,000 workers were confirmed to be deaths directly related to building stadia it is just as horrible and needs to be known.
"Even if only 1,000 workers were confirmed to be deaths"...
thats the problem, you are just guessing, yes 1000 deaths on a construction project would be an awful lot - but the article makes zero claims about how many people died from the heat, from heart diseases from covid or even from the covid vaccine, or from the actual project - which is the implied cause, without citing any data - just listing a high number of deaths that happened in a population of people, after some other event occurred, means less than nothing.
Thats not 'nitpicking', that pointing out glaring laziness on the part of the author to imply a cause and effect, and provide ZERO data to back it up.
That's a fair call regarding the title I used. I didn't intend it to be misleading - I was being sloppy as I found the number absolutely shocking. Perhaps something like "At least 6,500 construction deaths in Qatar since winning the bid to host the World Cup" would be fairer.
I am having difficulty correlating the click-baity title with the content of the article.
For example, the article says "death records are not categorised by occupation or place of work, it is likely many workers who have died were employed on these World Cup infrastructure projects" .... i.e. the article is making an inference ("it is likely") from data that does not exist.
The article also goes on to say "There have been 37 deaths among workers directly linked to construction of World Cup stadiums, of which 34 are classified as “non-work related” by the event’s organising committee." .... 37 is quite a long way off 6,500.
I'm not necessarily seeking to defend Qatar, I've got no dogs in that fight, so I will stay neutral on that particular commentary.
I'm just saying if you're going to be posting headlines like that, then there should really be some substance to it ... at the moment the linked article raises more questions than it answers.
The controversy surrounding the ranges in numbers has been a topic for many years. To your point, the 37 number has been quoted as a rebuttal to the 6,500 number, but from my memory, the 37 number has its own set of weak assumptions, and controversy on measurement. I forget what those are, but you’re right- it’s unclear and this article adds to confusion/controversy rather than substantiates the 6,500 figure.
I thought this had been debunked and that actually the death rate included all deaths of migrants for any reason (cancer, accidents at home etc). I also thought that the death rate was lower than if these migrants had stayed in their own countries. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33019838 is from 2015 but I thought I read something more recently.
It just goes to show how little agency these workers have. One dumb story drawing outsized conclusions with bad data has people claiming Qatar is A-OK because the story is wrong.
It may very well be that workers have a lower death rate in Qatar than in the medieval-level conditions of their home countries, but that doesn't excuse indentured servitude (actual modern slavery) which is what many face in Qatar and UAE.
In the 1700's British slave traders brought Africans to the new world where most lived longer lives than they would have in their homelands. How does that reflect badly on British slave traders? </sarcasm>
These aren't construction deaths. Nor are they deaths related to the world cup. This number includes every migrant worker death in Qatar since the World Cup was awarded, there are over 2 million migrant workers in Qatar.
When I lived in Abu Dhabi, I’d often see migrant workers - mainly from Kerala - out tending to the roadside plants in ~50 celsius temperatures in the summer. That was pretty representative of their treatment on the whole. Disgusting disregard for human life.
Do you think those people (and their families!) would have been better off if they stayed in Kerala?
I’ve lived in the UAE too, and actually had conversations with many of these people. Many of them missed home, but it was all worth it for the relatively massive amounts of money they were earning.
I think comments like yours are often ignorant of just how rough lives these people would have back home.
If your employer confiscates your passport in the UAE, you just have to call 80060 and you’ll have the police bringing it back to you real soon. It is illegal for employers to do that, and enforcement is swift.
All low-skill immigrant workers have to watch an hour long video explaining this (and all their other rights) in order to get their visa.
——
Edit: Sorry, I can’t reply to you below darkteflon. I’ve seen the worker camps, but I’ve also extensively toured India and it’s neighboring countries. UAE and Qatar only look bad when compared with the West, but in reality they’re doing more to help these people than the Western countries which would never even grant them visas.
> This is not a Rule of Law jurisdiction
Sure, I agree. I have a plenty of bad things to say about these countries, but I think that their treatment of migrant workers is a particularly weak criticism.
I’ll accept the criticism as valid the day Western countries start offering visas to similar categories of migrant workers.
Come on man. If you’ve lived there, you’ve seen the work camps and the conditions those guys live in, and you’ve seen accounts of their de facto imprisonment. This is not a Rule of Law jurisdiction.
> If your employer confiscates your passport in the UAE, you just have to call 80060 and you’ll have the police bringing it back to you real soon
I find this argument either naive or dishonest. Any average adult knows there's a big difference between how things are supposed to work in theory and how they actually go.
Can you provide some evidence that it doesn’t actually work like this? My UAE based lawyer is certainly convinced that MOHRE enforcement is very strict.
All you have to do is spin anticlockwise twice, clap 5 times, say magic word and poof bad people with stop being bad. Everyone knows that in X country.
At this stage you cant say if they are naive or a troll.
Playing the devil’s advocate your argument is even more strawman: purely because you can always make up an imaginary world where everybody is happy and unicorns are pooping candy.
> purely because you can always make up an imaginary world where everybody is happy and unicorns are pooping candy.
That doesn't hold up, he argues that they should be treated like other citizens of the country they emigrated to (treated like a human). And not to be extra privileged based on some utopia.
Just because a North Korean escapes life work camp sentence , it doesn't give South Korea right to put them in a South Korean work camp.
> Western countries will not take these kinds of immigrants at all.
That's outright not true, they will not take ALL of the immigrants. Thats how you create strawman justifying un-institutionalized slavery.
Secondly, letting all immigrants come and treating them like objects/slaves is immoral.
Also it would negatively impact the local economy, cheapening production overhead for businesses that will exploit slaves driving bottom-line for everyone else.
> That's outright not true, they will not take ALL of the immigrants.
No, it’s just impossible to get a regular EU or US work visa as an unskilled laborer from some Indian village.
There are some seasonal worker visas available which are perhaps even more “abusive” than those offered by the gulf countries, but nothing long term.
> Secondly, letting all immigrants come and treating them like objects/slaves is immoral
Oof. You say this like it’s obvious. I say it’s not obvious at all, especially when “treating them like objects/slaves” is code for “vastly improving their lives, but not by enough”.
Do you think it’s moral to leave these people to fend for themselves in the vastly worse conditions they exist in?
The world isn’t black and white. As I see it, the gulf countries are doing vastly more to improve these peoples lives than Western countries. Can you refute that? I’m genuinely interested in being proven wrong.
> Also it would negatively impact the local economy, cheapening production overhead for businesses that will exploit slaves driving bottom-line for everyone else
This is a positive effect, consumers will have access to cheaper goods.
> South was doing the same claiming that their slaves have better and they educate the savages through work and lords word.
But the South took away their freedom, it’s really incomparable with what is going on in UAE and Qatar. Those migrant workers can leave if they want, they aren’t slaves.
>HAHAHA, ok this is a troll.
>Tell that to Yemen, Saudis are helping them. They are just not realizing it.
I think you’re the one trolling here. What does Yemen have to do with this conversation? I believe that the visa and labour policies of some gulf countries are good, I do not believe that these countries aren’t run by downright evil regimes.
> I am not sure if you are ignorant or blindly nationalistic to claim they are somehow working for good of the world, its pointeless to continue this
I never made such a claim. If you think I did, you must suffer from some severe mental illness.
I think these countries are totalitarian hellholes engaged in a lot of evil. However I don’t think their treatment of migrant workers is an example of that.
I only claim that gulf countries are doing more good for the South Asians they offer easy visas to than Western countries who would never grant them visas.
> Do you think those people (and their families!) would have been better off if they stayed in Kerala?
Probably not, but the consequence of that shouldn't be to excuse unnecessarily dangerous or abusive working conditions. I think it is morally good to pay people just a few dollars an hour if the alternative to that is that they have nothing. The people who advocate for trade barriers to stop such things are only harming the poor people that they are pretending to care for. But these workers should at least get a safe and respectful work environment. There is too much bullying and abuse that these people face in their work environments which serves no business purpose. It's a big problem in East Asia and the Middle East especially.
Your current title still implies construction deaths, which isn't true.
Better to change it from "At least 6,500 construction deaths in Qatar since winning the World Cup bid" to "At least 6,500 migrant worker deaths in Qatar since winning the World Cup bid".
Ok - sorry I've really screwed this submission up. I think the points that many have made in the comments about the clickbaitiness and misleading nature/incorrect interpretation of the title I used are completely valid.
I had found it pretty shocking, given say the 37 average annual deaths in construction in a country like the UK which has over 20 times the population, so rushed to create a HN submission.
> More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago, the Guardian can reveal.
I tried to work out the context for this figure, but the answer I found made no sense. It's frustrating that I'm having to figure this out myself rather than The Guardian being responsible.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar there are approximately 2.3 million migrant workers in Qatar. For 6500 of them to die over 10 years is a death rate of 6500/(10*2300000) = 0.000283.
The typical such worker is perhaps an Indian immigrant in the 35-39 age bracket. According to https://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main.60740?lang=en such people would have a death rate of 0.00319, if they remained in India.
So have I made a mistake, or is this article really about the fact that being a near-slave in Qatar cuts your risk of death by 91%?
The average HN reader isn’t at all like that, though some will love to advertise their high-school math skills to justify their lack of care with a high brow witticism.
It’s frankly quite shocking how many people here are okay with this. I think most HNers are quite sheltered and unaware exactly how tough life for many people in the world and cannot accept it.
Well the article does come from The Guardian, an outlet that has a long-standing nickname of The Grauniad because of its long-standing history of typographical and other errors.
> the average HN user has absolutely no idea how rough conditions these migrant workers tend to come from
But do we want to frame it that way? Does it matter where you come from or where you come to? We're talking about Qatar here and if the numbers are correct, they're doing a bad job at keeping those people alive. Saying "it's worse where they come from" is not actually a defense. You judge the situation, not the trend. You can be better and still be terrible at the same time.
I think you are making a mistake here comparing probability of death in a general population and a population of migrant workers. In general population there are people of different ages, including very old people, people with incurable illnesses, people with poor health. For comparison, migrants are generally more healthy because otherwise they wouldn't be able to do their job. For example, migrant workers are unlikely to die from being too old. Therefore, the probability of death from natural reasons for a migrant should be lower.
So we can assume that those 6500 people probably died because of other reasons, like traffic accidents, workplace accidents, bad living conditions, not getting medical treatment, and so on.
The same table says males in UK had a death rate of 0.00106 between 35 and 39 years of age in 2019 (5 times higher than workers in Qatar) so I don't know what's the mistake but it seems to me we can't compare those 2 numbers like that.
Right, the numbers are so far in Qatar's favour that we know they must be wrong. Which makes it even more ridiculous that The Guardian has managed to fabricate a negative article from them.
I've flagged this. People die every single day, it's the inevitable tragedy that comes with being alive. The 6,500 weren't people that died on the job site, it includes all-cause mortality from a total of 2,000,000 people according to the article.
Qatar's treatment of everyone is horrible -- it's not a great country. It's suspicious that they received the ability to host the World Cup. But the available data doesn't back the claims just yet. It deserves more attention, but that's something that should be up to the government's of the nationals dying to poke at. An article that takes a single data point and extrapolates it emotionally isn't the type of journalism we should be aiming for -- we've had enough of that over the last few decades.
When working outdoors in middle-eastern countries and the temperature goes above certain range (like 45C/110F range), sirens/alarms are raised to halt the work and give a cool-off period for the workers. My friend worked as an instrumentation engineer in the region and he mentioned about a wide-spread malpractice of recalibrating these monitoring tools to increase the temperature threshold by few degrees. So, the sirens won't sound at 110F but instead will sound only at 115F. And there are many other instances to prove the horrible working conditions and lack of safer work environment. Qatar is relatively less worse compared to the other nearby countries though.
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[ 0.38 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadThe title of this post isn’t really honest. It says “at least 6,500 deaths constructing stadia for the World Cup” but the Guardian article is titled “6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since World Cup awarded”.
And yes, I’m aware of migrant abuse in Qatar and other relatively wealthy Middle Eastern countries…just want to set the facts straight
As I understand the GP, the point is that during the construction of the any sporting facilities, some workers will have died but it won't have been directly related to the work they did.
In Qatar, that number is >6500. In the UK, we don't know the number.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/weekly-all-cause-mo...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26595089/
Same statistics are available in the UK, although immigrant-specific numbers aren’t updated on a weekly basis.
I can't imagine that many people dying on an engineering project anywhere else in Europe, unless perhaps there was a major incident like a tunnel collapse. But that would be headline news around the world.
How is this for a headline?
"5,333 US workers died in the 12 months following Qatar withdrawing from OPEC"
or
"5,333 US Workers died in the 12 months following Austria legalizing same sex marriage"
source: https://www.onthisday.com/events/date/2019/january https://www.osha.gov/data/commonstats
The article mentions a sum of 6,751 deaths not including several countries (Philippines and Kenya), so "at least 6,500" is correct. The article also says "While death records are not categorised by occupation or place of work, it is likely many workers who have died were employed on these World Cup infrastructure projects", so the "constructing stadia for the World Cup", although a bit loosely, is also true.
I don't get what you were trying to open our eyes to with your comment. Even if only 1,000 workers were confirmed to be deaths directly related to building stadia it is just as horrible and needs to be known.
thats the problem, you are just guessing, yes 1000 deaths on a construction project would be an awful lot - but the article makes zero claims about how many people died from the heat, from heart diseases from covid or even from the covid vaccine, or from the actual project - which is the implied cause, without citing any data - just listing a high number of deaths that happened in a population of people, after some other event occurred, means less than nothing.
Thats not 'nitpicking', that pointing out glaring laziness on the part of the author to imply a cause and effect, and provide ZERO data to back it up.
This number represents all-cause mortality.
What word would you use other than stadia to describe the plural of stadium?
Or were you making some other point about talking about stadia in general?
1 - https://stadia.google.com/
I hadn’t even considered the Google product.
For example, the article says "death records are not categorised by occupation or place of work, it is likely many workers who have died were employed on these World Cup infrastructure projects" .... i.e. the article is making an inference ("it is likely") from data that does not exist.
The article also goes on to say "There have been 37 deaths among workers directly linked to construction of World Cup stadiums, of which 34 are classified as “non-work related” by the event’s organising committee." .... 37 is quite a long way off 6,500.
I'm not necessarily seeking to defend Qatar, I've got no dogs in that fight, so I will stay neutral on that particular commentary.
I'm just saying if you're going to be posting headlines like that, then there should really be some substance to it ... at the moment the linked article raises more questions than it answers.
6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since World Cup awarded
Not "constructing stadia in Qatar for the world cup".
It may very well be that workers have a lower death rate in Qatar than in the medieval-level conditions of their home countries, but that doesn't excuse indentured servitude (actual modern slavery) which is what many face in Qatar and UAE.
In the 1700's British slave traders brought Africans to the new world where most lived longer lives than they would have in their homelands. How does that reflect badly on British slave traders? </sarcasm>
I’ve lived in the UAE too, and actually had conversations with many of these people. Many of them missed home, but it was all worth it for the relatively massive amounts of money they were earning.
I think comments like yours are often ignorant of just how rough lives these people would have back home.
All low-skill immigrant workers have to watch an hour long video explaining this (and all their other rights) in order to get their visa.
——
Edit: Sorry, I can’t reply to you below darkteflon. I’ve seen the worker camps, but I’ve also extensively toured India and it’s neighboring countries. UAE and Qatar only look bad when compared with the West, but in reality they’re doing more to help these people than the Western countries which would never even grant them visas.
> This is not a Rule of Law jurisdiction
Sure, I agree. I have a plenty of bad things to say about these countries, but I think that their treatment of migrant workers is a particularly weak criticism.
I’ll accept the criticism as valid the day Western countries start offering visas to similar categories of migrant workers.
I find this argument either naive or dishonest. Any average adult knows there's a big difference between how things are supposed to work in theory and how they actually go.
At this stage you cant say if they are naive or a troll.
That doesn't hold up, he argues that they should be treated like other citizens of the country they emigrated to (treated like a human). And not to be extra privileged based on some utopia.
Just because a North Korean escapes life work camp sentence , it doesn't give South Korea right to put them in a South Korean work camp.
Western countries will not take these kinds of immigrants at all.
Qatar will take these immigrants, offer them significantly better pay and quality of life than what they had at home.
Qatar is bad?
Perhaps the heavy restrictions Western countries place on immigration are even worse?
That's outright not true, they will not take ALL of the immigrants. Thats how you create strawman justifying un-institutionalized slavery.
Secondly, letting all immigrants come and treating them like objects/slaves is immoral.
Also it would negatively impact the local economy, cheapening production overhead for businesses that will exploit slaves driving bottom-line for everyone else.
No, it’s just impossible to get a regular EU or US work visa as an unskilled laborer from some Indian village.
There are some seasonal worker visas available which are perhaps even more “abusive” than those offered by the gulf countries, but nothing long term.
> Secondly, letting all immigrants come and treating them like objects/slaves is immoral
Oof. You say this like it’s obvious. I say it’s not obvious at all, especially when “treating them like objects/slaves” is code for “vastly improving their lives, but not by enough”.
Do you think it’s moral to leave these people to fend for themselves in the vastly worse conditions they exist in?
The world isn’t black and white. As I see it, the gulf countries are doing vastly more to improve these peoples lives than Western countries. Can you refute that? I’m genuinely interested in being proven wrong.
> Also it would negatively impact the local economy, cheapening production overhead for businesses that will exploit slaves driving bottom-line for everyone else
This is a positive effect, consumers will have access to cheaper goods.
This is moral relativism and as you clearly presenting it leads to slippery slope arguments.
Like justifying slavery and exploitation.
South was doing the same claiming that their slaves have better and they educate the savages through work and lords word.
> As I see it, the gulf countries are doing vastly more to improve these peoples lives than Western countries.
HAHAHA, ok this is a troll.
Tell that to Yemen, Saudis are helping them. They are just not realizing it.
But the South took away their freedom, it’s really incomparable with what is going on in UAE and Qatar. Those migrant workers can leave if they want, they aren’t slaves.
>HAHAHA, ok this is a troll.
>Tell that to Yemen, Saudis are helping them. They are just not realizing it.
I think you’re the one trolling here. What does Yemen have to do with this conversation? I believe that the visa and labour policies of some gulf countries are good, I do not believe that these countries aren’t run by downright evil regimes.
Saudis are exterminating Yemen since 2015, sabotage Qatar, fund isis and Al-Qaeda.
Fund Bashar al-Assad atrocities against his own people.
I am not sure if you are ignorant or blindly nationalistic to claim they are somehow working for good of the world, its pointeless to continue this
I never made such a claim. If you think I did, you must suffer from some severe mental illness.
I think these countries are totalitarian hellholes engaged in a lot of evil. However I don’t think their treatment of migrant workers is an example of that.
I only claim that gulf countries are doing more good for the South Asians they offer easy visas to than Western countries who would never grant them visas.
Probably not, but the consequence of that shouldn't be to excuse unnecessarily dangerous or abusive working conditions. I think it is morally good to pay people just a few dollars an hour if the alternative to that is that they have nothing. The people who advocate for trade barriers to stop such things are only harming the poor people that they are pretending to care for. But these workers should at least get a safe and respectful work environment. There is too much bullying and abuse that these people face in their work environments which serves no business purpose. It's a big problem in East Asia and the Middle East especially.
Better to change it from "At least 6,500 construction deaths in Qatar since winning the World Cup bid" to "At least 6,500 migrant worker deaths in Qatar since winning the World Cup bid".
I had found it pretty shocking, given say the 37 average annual deaths in construction in a country like the UK which has over 20 times the population, so rushed to create a HN submission.
I tried to work out the context for this figure, but the answer I found made no sense. It's frustrating that I'm having to figure this out myself rather than The Guardian being responsible.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar there are approximately 2.3 million migrant workers in Qatar. For 6500 of them to die over 10 years is a death rate of 6500/(10*2300000) = 0.000283.
The typical such worker is perhaps an Indian immigrant in the 35-39 age bracket. According to https://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main.60740?lang=en such people would have a death rate of 0.00319, if they remained in India.
So have I made a mistake, or is this article really about the fact that being a near-slave in Qatar cuts your risk of death by 91%?
No, you haven’t made a mistake.
The issue here is that the average HN user has absolutely no idea how rough conditions these migrant workers tend to come from.
Well the article does come from The Guardian, an outlet that has a long-standing nickname of The Grauniad because of its long-standing history of typographical and other errors.
But do we want to frame it that way? Does it matter where you come from or where you come to? We're talking about Qatar here and if the numbers are correct, they're doing a bad job at keeping those people alive. Saying "it's worse where they come from" is not actually a defense. You judge the situation, not the trend. You can be better and still be terrible at the same time.
That’s actually not at all what those numbers suggest.
Doesn't change any potential mistreatment of workers in catar.
Catar needs to be measured by modern worker protection laws or standards.
But why? Western countries with modern worker protection laws would never grant visas to these people. Qatar lets them in by the millions.
How is this supposed to be a reasonable comparison?
How is this any reason to accept bad working conditions?
They are a rich and relativ modern country
So we can assume that those 6500 people probably died because of other reasons, like traffic accidents, workplace accidents, bad living conditions, not getting medical treatment, and so on.
But if we were to believe these numbers, the only possible conclusions would reflect very well on Qatar.
Qatar's treatment of everyone is horrible -- it's not a great country. It's suspicious that they received the ability to host the World Cup. But the available data doesn't back the claims just yet. It deserves more attention, but that's something that should be up to the government's of the nationals dying to poke at. An article that takes a single data point and extrapolates it emotionally isn't the type of journalism we should be aiming for -- we've had enough of that over the last few decades.