How Qatar built stadiums with forced labor

This is the last of our four-part World Cup coverage. For more, take a listen to Vox’s daily news podcast, Today Explained. They’ve covered everything from Qatar to players who became legends from winning the World Cup: spoti.fi/3P7jwZP You can also read more of our crucial reporting on the migrant labor system on vox.com/ here: bit.ly/3itjO0J

When your country is soooo rich and desperately needs workers but you still gotta trap them in debt and not allow them to leave. Taking their passports and not even letting them go home. Modern day slavery.

This happened to our family driver. He was promised a decent job in Saudi Arabia but instead his passport was confiscated and was forced to work as a servant for an Arab family. He spent more than a year there, and he basically had to escape the house with his passport to fly back home. This happened more than 10 years ago, he has a wife and 2 kids now but he has refused to fly overseas completely, the dude is still traumatized by what happened.

my uncle in his younger days used to work in a middle eastern country with a name similar to the USA (censoring), he worked in a cleaning team, the kind you hire to clean your home/hotel, he worked that way for a year and later got an offer to become the house help of a sheikh there, he agreed to it, they told him they need his passport for visa stuff and he did give it to them, and was told to come to work immediately, to his horror HE WAS TRAPPED. his passport was not given back to him and he was supposed to live with them in a horribly maintained servant quaters. he worked there for around 5 months, luckily the sheikh's wife was fond of him. he kept requesting her to give him his passport so he can be free. although initially she disagreed his pleas, eventually she was able to give him back his passport and he was able to escape from there. he was never paid for the work he did there. later on, he went to work in america and said altho he faced racism there, it is nothing compared to the sub human treatment he got in that country.

I am from Bangladesh, lots of my relatives and Brothers are working in Middle East including Qatar. The situation is, the people who go there for work are mostly unskilled and uneducated. They try and want to go Europ, America and others country but failed and rejected. This is Qatar and Middle East who give them the opportunity to come and earn 10 times higher than their native country. The average construction worker in my country earn 3-5 dollers a day where in Qatar they get more than 30 dollers a day. That's why they risk their life to go Qatar like country to change their fate.This video tells that people are fall in debt to arrange the cost of going Qatar, It's take six time more money to go europ for the same working visa than Qatar. If middle east stop hairing people from countries like us it will be huge loss not only for individual like me but also for the hole countries economy because remittance from those countries is a major source of foreign income.

Not really different to Dubai where workers are brought in from India and Bangladesh and Pakistan etc, who live in builder cabins on bunkbeds, have their passports taken away and not given back, then they're not paid for their work. So they can't leave nor afford to leave. Sad that the rest of us care but don't really care as long as X and Y buildings lead to Z for us.

With a heavy heart, I hope the newly opened ILO office in Qatar will ensure that the labour laws are now fullfilled as reformed after the world cup is over and they also ensure the same in whole region.

I'm reading so many of your comments here, and it's like reliving my days in Saudi Arabia, rage-reading newspaper headlines everyday, waiting for my dad's kafala/sponsorship issues to finally be resolved so our paperwork could be fixed and I could finally go back to school. I never did go back to school. At some point, I had enough. I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia and was trying to make a presence in the Jeddah art scene. But the people I met in that scene were wonderful but I knew the government didn't want me and other immigrants' children there anymore—and they would only make our lives harder as the years went on. So, I left to my father's country and have been happy here since.

One of my classmates lost his father a few years ago. He was really poor and was enrolled under the RTE scheme for free in my relatively expensive private school. He told me that his father, who was a janitor in the school, died while at his job constructing a stadium in a foreign country. I remembered this while watching the video. He was just 29 and they never received his body. The school management sponsored his education but I don't know if he could continue his education after class 10. The saddest part is that this happened just before Diwali, when he was expected to return on leave.

This was known well before Qatar was chosen to host the world cup this year. Their labor practices have been documented pretty well prior to all of this. Fans still chose to purchase tickets while being aware of what it took to get these venues built up.

This story is a perfect example why employers should not have control over the lives of workers in ANY ASPECT. We are citizens and we should have a right to work and maintain our rights and working conditions without fear of retaliation or abuse. If Americans and other countries can look at this and see the problem then they should be able to see the problem with having their own healthcare, housing, food, and basic living attached to their employer instead of having a community based environment that guarantees basic resources we all depend on for survival and freedom. A third realm separate from businesses and government. Where you can live free and have the equal opportunity to work and pursue your ambitions and not have those things compromised because an employer and a complicit government decide they can get you to do whatever they want. If we keep sitting on this, it will only get worse at home just like Qatar. Workers rights are human rights.

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When I went to Saudi Arabia for Umrah, I visited the Masjid-E-Nababi at Medinah. There, an elderly Bangladeshi guy was cleaning the streets. My dad talked to him about how it's like here, has he visited home recently etc. The elderly man broke down in tears. My dad just pushed some money in his hands and left quickly as he couldn't bear to see his grief. It was 4 years ago and it still fills me with rage to this day.

This whole shitstorm exposed the horrendous level of corruption in FIFA. I don’t think I can ever support them or watch their events without any guilt in conscience again.

This is heartbreaking. Why world is silent on this? World is equally responsible for allowing this modern day slavery.

This system doesn't exist only in Qatar. It's across Middle East. And not only to workers but to the executive class as well. I was trapped as well but escaped before my passport was confiscated. The organisation doing this was a German MNC. The regional office in Saudi Arabia. My sincere request to whoever reading this is NOT to go to any Middle East countries for any kind of job. Work related travel is ok.

It's sad to think that most, if not all, of them were recruited by a shady domestic agency. Which means, they were sent to the grave by their own people.

This isn't mere content, this is a plea for awareness against basic human rights. Thanks Vox for doing this 🙌

RIP all hard working people who left us for world entertainment

Thank you for this video, Vox. It's been close to 8 years since I left Saudi Arabia, a country with mostly wonderful people but that awful kafala system. I'd been journaling and scrap-booking about it for years, but I never had the courage to share it