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super__mirage t1_ix4ib8m wrote

of course, why would these companies care about human rights and slavery if there's some money on the line? It's expensive to do the right thing!

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A_Soporific t1_ix4kwh6 wrote

I think that's a bit weird position to take. After all, breaking contracts is costly. The company doesn't pay when things get expensive, the company is just a legal fiction. It's the shareholders and workers. The shareholders are usually people with retirement accounts moreso than incredibly wealthy.

It's okay to ask companies to do the expensive, and morally correct, things. But you have to recognize that doing so will hurt a lot of people. Continuing to broadcast as per the contract but highlighting the problems is more likely to punish Qatar in the long run.

The "get" for Qatar, the reason they are doing all of this is to create a new Qatari tourism industry. To compete with regional rivals like the UAE's Dubai or Saudi Arabia's NEOM by diversifying from oil into something "soft power"-y. If you hammer home the problems with Qatar's actions in the very thing that is supposed to win popular opinion to their side then you hurt them far more than declining to show the World Cup would.

I mean, if you break your contracts then people might blame you and continue to ignore Qatar's bad actions. If you highlight the problems then there's no distraction from the human right's abuses.

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