They’re earning up to $0.50 an hour. I’m not here to defend anyone doing that, and nor should anyone. The USA also has some horrendous working conditions, I’m not defending this either (although, nowhere is it legally this bad).

There is obviously a lot of money in Qatar - it shouldn’t be morally acceptable to find the population with the lowest wage expectancy in the world and exploit that.

My point is more that arguing a contested statistic is a bad framing device. I think arguing specifically over migrant deaths is a red herring - and it allows those who are trying to dismiss the issue an easy way to disregard the entire discussion.

There is plenty of evidence that migrants are being convinced to pay a lot of money through phoney ‘recruitment agencies’, often emptying their life savings into such schemes to earn as little as $0.50 per hour in excruciating conditions.

Human Rights Watch are literally having to remind the Qatari government that their labour force actually do need to be paid at all. There are accounts of workers being deported without pay. These are based on accounts and obviously won’t be accounted for in any official data.

Added to which, I find the argument ‘these workers have conditions just as bad in [insert developing nation] to be unsatisfactory. These developing nations don’t have the resources for 10 billion dollar vanity projects - and if they did, obviously they should be treating workers well, too. Working standards shouldn’t be a race to the very lowest standards in the world.

EDIT: Finding the downvotes amusing. There’s not a lot that’s controversial here than pointing out facts. Workers ARE being paid as little as $0.50 an hour. Qatar CAN afford to pay them more. There HAVE been difficulties with workers being paid at all. These are all facts. If you want to argue the point on working conditions in other countries, then…I guess you must really like capitalism.

Focussing on deaths allows apologists to say ‘throw this out, it refers to ALL deaths’. And neatly sidesteps the fact that most of the entire country over the last 20 years has been built out of slave labour, under horrendous working conditions.

If you pay attention, plenty of people are complaining about those things too - and have been for years.

Sportswashing is a real thing and it’s killing sport. Qatar is no different.