The camera’s lens sweeps down a flight of stairs in the four-story building near Doha, Qatar’s capital, before panning in on dank sleeping quarters, where four bunk beds are squeezed into a dimly-lit space. A shirtless man wears nothing but yellow and green Bermuda shorts, his face blurred to protect his identity.
Moments later, the viewer is led into filthy kitchen and bathroom areas, where feces and excrement are overflowing from a hole in the floor that serves as a toilet. Meat cooks in a frying pan on a decrepit stove, the walls around it rank with filth.
“These are the most appalling toilet conditions, with nothing but a hole in the ground and s— spilling out onto the floor,” says Jaimie Fuller, the visitor seen in the documentary short, as he inspects one of the many labor camps around Qatar. “A foot away from the toilet, if you want to call it that, is a shower. It’s just dreadful.”
Welcome to the working conditions that many of the migrant workers living in Qatar are forced to endure as they help the Arab nation build its infrastructure to prepare for the 2022 World Cup.
Fuller, the chairman of Skins, a global compression wear company, was able to view the grim work sites first-hand in March, after he says a “fixer” helped smuggle him into several camps in and around Doha. Fuller, who is Australian, has partnered with several other influential individuals, including British Parliament member Damian Collins and Australian Bonita Mersiades, a communications consultant and soccer reform activist, to start a movement called “New FIFA Now,” which is advocating reform and change throughout soccer’s world governing body.
In an interview with the Daily News, Fuller said he hopes his trip to Qatar and the documentary short he produced there will draw the attention of FIFA sponsors. NewFifanow.org recently began a campaign with the International Trade Union Confederation, an international workers’ rights group, that shines a harsh light on the deplorable working conditions of migrant workers in Qatar. The video campaign urges FIFA’s main sponsors to sever their business relationships with FIFA unless work conditions and workers’ rights in Qatar improve.
“You’re talking about a country of 2.4 million, and 300,000 are Qatari nationals. The vast majority are migrant workers, many from Nepal. At these labor camps, you have eight to 12 people living in sardine-packed rooms,” says Fuller. “This comes down purely to FIFA saying, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that all these improvements are being done for the World Cup?’ Then you have workers dying from these conditions. FIFA (executives) shouldn’t be able to sleep knowing how these workers are living.”
Fuller says he has corresponded with numerous FIFA sponsors. Earlier this month he received a letter from Coca-Cola after Fuller had written the soft drink giant in January.
“We are fully aligned with the U.N. Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, which outline the role of businesses to respect human rights. We do that in a number of ways within our own business and our supply chain,” Brent Wilton, Coca-Cola’s director of global workplace rights, wrote in a letter to Fuller. “You rightly point out that we have established a Human Rights Policy, Code of Business Conduct and Supplier Guiding Principles that require our operations and those of our suppliers to adhere to a strong set of workplace and human rights requirements. We educate our workforce and suppliers on those expectations and conduct audits to measure compliance.”
Wilton suggested a meeting between Coca-Cola and Fuller, and Fuller promptly responded with the suggestion they convene in Qatar. “I’ll be dumbfounded if they agree to meet,” says Fuller.
Only a face-to-face experience at the labor camps, says Fuller, can truly convey what these workers are enduring.
“The look in their eyes — it’s a blank look of helplessness,” says Fuller. “It’s inexcusable.”
In the wake of the sweeping 47-count indictment unsealed Wednesday which charged 14 FIFA and sports marketing executives with numerous crimes, Fuller questions why another huge company like financial services giant Visa doesn’t pull its sponsorship with FIFA.
“In a business like Visa, where governance and probity is everything, it’s difficult to see how it can reconcile being partners with FIFA after an indictment outlined racketeering, corruption and bribery,” says Fuller. “A message needs to get through to Visa about why they are not being more aggressive and demanding action.”
Visa issued a statement earlier in the week which addressed the company’s concerns about the Qatar working conditions: “We continue to be troubled by the reports coming out of Qatar related to the World Cup and migrant worker conditions,” the Visa statement said. “We have expressed our grave concern to FIFA and urge them to take all necessary actions to work with the appropriate authorities and organizations to remedy this situation and ensure the health and safety of all involved.”
MOBILE USERS: WATCH THE VIDEO HERE
