The construction boom in Qatar has proven deadly for scores of the country's migrant workers. The International Trade Union Confederation estimates that horrendous working conditions will be responsible for 4,000 migrant worker deaths leading up to the FIFA World Cup in 2022. Qatar's government estimates that almost 1,000 migrants--mostly workers from Nepal, India, and Bangladesh--died between 2012 and 2013.

The Guardian, which has been investigating worker conditions in the world's richest country for months, just released an in-depth look at the plight of exploited foreign workers in Qatar. It includes this simple, but powerful, flowchart, detailing the life of a migrant worker.

Qatar has what is called a kafala system: Employers take away migrant workers' passports, and the workers must seek an employer's permission to change jobs or leave the country. The result is a system of forced labor where workers are often denied wages, forced to live in crowded, unsanitary conditions, and overworked in the heat. "It is modern slavery enforced not through shackles and whips, but by fiddled contracts, missing permits, and paperwork," the Guardian writes.

That casts a pall over the construction of any big project in Qatar, where plenty of prominent architects have taken commissions.

Pattern of exploitation
The Al Bidda workers’ predicament is far from unique. Despite recent assurances by the government that it will reform its labour system and remove the power that employers have over their workers, the Gulf state’s extraordinary ambition is still being enabled by exploitation and forced labour of some of the world’s poorest people.

The story repeats itself. Men from the poorest countries of the world are offered jobs at low but acceptable wages only to find, on arrival in Qatar, their pay slashed and then stopped altogether. The excuses come: the subcontractor hasn’t been paid; the money will come by Monday, but the pay does not arrive. Employers seize the workers’ passports and the only body that can issue a permit for a worker to leave Qatar is the employer himself. Changing jobs is equally impossible: according to Qatari law employers must issue a “non-objection certificate”.

It is modern slavery enforced not through shackles and whips, but by fiddled contracts, missing permits and paperwork and the Guardian has found it happening just down the road from the desert palace of Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Khalifa al-Thani.

The turn off the eight-lane Dukhan highway, just 20 minutes west from the vast royal desert palace compound, into Shahaniyah camp is a transition to a scene redolent of one of the poorest parts of south Asia. The road becomes a rocky track, street lights disappear and men in lunghis weave through the shadows past rubbish-filled gullies.

This is where 25-year-old Nepalese father-of-two Ujjwal Bishwakarma lives in squalor with colleagues who work six or seven days a week building car showrooms, apartments and supermarkets. Inside the low-slung concrete blocks, eight men sleep to a room. They work for a theoretical wage of around £8 a day. But 65 of them say they have not been paid for any of the work they have done since January by their employer, Ibex Contracting and Trading.

There are no showers. Instead men wash in broken and filthy squat toilet cubicles. The cisterns are not even connected to the water supply, bins overflow, the washing water is salty and the drinking water filter is only changed once in five months, workers say, causing stomach upsets. They can’t afford medicine and their employer has not provided medical cards granting access to free care.

Ujjwal left the Sindhuli district of central Nepal last autumn shortly before the birth of his second child, Milo, whom he has never seen. Without his remittances, his family has been forced to take a £660 loan from a private lender charging 48% interest a year. Every day he remains unpaid, the debt is mounting. His employer has taken his passport and he cannot move jobs because of Qatar’s labour laws.

“There’s nobody else to look after my family so they had to take the loan,” he says. “We have questioned [the company] time and again. In the past two months the company keeps on extending the date of providing salaries. They have extended the date four times so far. It is not good. Because the country is economically rich, the workers should be paid their fixed salaries. I am regretting coming to Qatar.”

Death and injury
Old Tata buses rattle along Doha’s highways as the sun goes down, taking exhausted workers on the long drive back to their camps. On a bus pulling out of Lusail City, a new town north of Doha where a new stadium will be built to host the 2022 World Cup final, workers peel off headscarves and masks. Some rest their foreheads on their arms to sleep and let the evening air blow through the windows to cool them down. Others fish out mobile phones and click on to Facebook or text home to Chennai, Kathmandu, Fujian or Cebu.

Above the din of the engines, talk turns to how injury and sometimes death has become part of life on Qatar’s building sites.

Umesh Rai, a Nepalese plumber who has spent three years in Qatar, tells of several accidents even though he says his employer provided proper safety equipment.
“Six or seven months back there was an accident,” he says. “Some heavy object fell down and hit a person on the ground. And another case was four months back when scaffolding fell and hit a man’s head, smashing his helmet.”

There have been other confirmed accidents involving other contractors. Midmac, a major contractor working at Lusail, said a Filipino trainee driver was crushed to death by a truck in a stock area last year. “The truck went forward and ran over the guy,” says Clark White, the company’s health and safety manager. “From the finding of the client everything was in place safety-wise.”

The firm has also confirmed another incident where about 17 workers were injured when a huge steel cage moved unexpectedly and trapped workers. It says the injuries were not serious.

The packed trauma unit at Hamad hospital provides a snapshot of the routine problems workers face. It is a high-quality facility: the main entrance evokes a five-star hotel and migrant workers have free healthcare if they have a medical card. But there are 70 workers in the packed trauma waiting room, some having collapsed unconscious or vomiting because of the heat, others with head injuries. One grimacing worker is helped in bow-legged, clutching his groin.

Outside, construction workers shelter from the sun under trees waiting for their colleagues to be treated but are shooed away by a Qatari official.

One of the great mysteries is why so many young fit men are dying from what the hospital authorities describe as “sudden cardiac death”. In 2012 and 2013, 500 men from India, Sri Lanka and Nepal died like this. Whether it is caused by exhaustion, heat or something else remains unclear because the Qatari health authorities do not routinely carry out autopsies.

Family's sorrow
One such case was Rishi Kumar Kandel, 42, who flew out to Qatar from Nepal in February. Within five months his coffin had arrived back at Kathmandu airport. He had died suddenly in his labour camp bed after a hot day’s work on 23 May.
Kandel had borrowed money at 24% a year to pay the £500 agent costs but by the time he died he had only managed to send £170 back home. The company that employed him says it won’t pay compensation because he died of natural causes.

Death and injury
Old Tata buses rattle along Doha’s highways as the sun goes down, taking exhausted workers on the long drive back to their camps. On a bus pulling out of Lusail City, a new town north of Doha where a new stadium will be built to host the 2022 World Cup final, workers peel off headscarves and masks. Some rest their foreheads on their arms to sleep and let the evening air blow through the windows to cool them down. Others fish out mobile phones and click on to Facebook or text home to Chennai, Kathmandu, Fujian or Cebu.

Above the din of the engines, talk turns to how injury and sometimes death has become part of life on Qatar’s building sites.

Umesh Rai, a Nepalese plumber who has spent three years in Qatar, tells of several accidents even though he says his employer provided proper safety equipment.
“Six or seven months back there was an accident,” he says. “Some heavy object fell down and hit a person on the ground. And another case was four months back when scaffolding fell and hit a man’s head, smashing his helmet.”

There have been other confirmed accidents involving other contractors. Midmac, a major contractor working at Lusail, said a Filipino trainee driver was crushed to death by a truck in a stock area last year. “The truck went forward and ran over the guy,” says Clark White, the company’s health and safety manager. “From the finding of the client everything was in place safety-wise.”

The firm has also confirmed another incident where about 17 workers were injured when a huge steel cage moved unexpectedly and trapped workers. It says the injuries were not serious.

The packed trauma unit at Hamad hospital provides a snapshot of the routine problems workers face. It is a high-quality facility: the main entrance evokes a five-star hotel and migrant workers have free healthcare if they have a medical card. But there are 70 workers in the packed trauma waiting room, some having collapsed unconscious or vomiting because of the heat, others with head injuries. One grimacing worker is helped in bow-legged, clutching his groin.

Outside, construction workers shelter from the sun under trees waiting for their colleagues to be treated but are shooed away by a Qatari official.

One of the great mysteries is why so many young fit men are dying from what the hospital authorities describe as “sudden cardiac death”. In 2012 and 2013, 500 men from India, Sri Lanka and Nepal died like this. Whether it is caused by exhaustion, heat or something else remains unclear because the Qatari health authorities do not routinely carry out autopsies.

Family's sorrow
One such case was Rishi Kumar Kandel, 42, who flew out to Qatar from Nepal in February. Within five months his coffin had arrived back at Kathmandu airport. He had died suddenly in his labour camp bed after a hot day’s work on 23 May.
Kandel had borrowed money at 24% a year to pay the £500 agent costs but by the time he died he had only managed to send £170 back home. The company that employed him says it won’t pay compensation because he died of natural causes.

heyyyyyy when will this end in this world,man inhumanity to man.lord have mercy on 3rd world countries.

I work in Qatar as an Engineer and I must tell you, what you said is not far from the truth although my company don't treat our laborers like this,and our laborers only work 8 hours a day and are paid overtime.The labour laws are about to change soon. All passports have been returned back to workers and you can leave the country whenever you want but the thing is,if you resign and leave, you can't come back to Qatar for 2 years

That means Qatar is an hot place plss can u advice should i reject the offer am having now from an uncle to come cos presently am not working am jobless plss quick response is appreciate