RT TV ran a documentary segment at 1:20 PM on 10/16/13 about the working conditions in Qatar [one of our scumbag slave-owning Islamic allies] for the migrant workers hired to build the 2020 World Cup Stadium. Soccer might be a non-contact sport, but the poor saps that have to build this stadium have it about as rough as a Baltimore crack-dealer.
The report began as a story about two German journalists who were arrested and held by Qatari authorities for the crime of journalism. The interesting part for me was what the German reporter who was telling his story to the British news anchor working for a Moscow news agency had to say about the plight of migrant workers in Qatar:
1. Migrant workers have no rights as we would understand them. They are regarded as dependents [basically a family pet] of a sponsor [usually the employer] who owns their passport and I.D. and controls access to health care and the legal system.
2. Workers are owed up to seven months of back pay and often never receive promised bonuses. Since they are not permitted to access the legal system except through their sponsor, who is usually the employer as well, they have no recourse.
3. Unpaid workers who quit, or hold out for wages, have their identifications and passports withheld so that they may not legally abide in or leave, Qatar, thereby making breathing a crime. Talk about some leeway for the police.
4. Workers are not provided with clean drinking water at the 110 degree worksites.
5. One worker dies per day on this construction project, primarily from heart attacks. It is estimated that it will cost 4,000 lives to build the 2020 World Cup Stadium.
I once worked with an oil rig man who spent twenty years on various Middle Eastern jobsites. He told me that he would rather work in the U.S. for one quarter the money. What were the worst aspects of working in Islamic nations according to this Vietnam combat veteran?
1. Customs officials and cops always confiscated any magazine that had at least one scantily clad woman in it [even if just a car model in a bathing suit]. “So even if you were just reading Soldier of Fortune, some fucking towel-head pig would scoop it up because the babes and guns catalog advertisement had a woman in shorts."
2. Available hookers were rare, overworked, ugly, and more likely than not to be male.
3. Alcohol was forbidden and greedily confiscated.
4. Living spaces were shared with Arabic workers who wiped their ass with their bare left hand and rinsed the hand off in the same sink where my friend brushed his teeth and filled his canteen, even holding a shit-pasted hand under the running water while the American was brushing his teeth.
Of course, on American TV, Qatar and other such shitholes are depicted as exotic paradises. I suppose so if you are a corporate American reporter who never leaves the hotel.
