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Living Conditions for Workers in Abu Dhabi Video

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Living Conditions for Workers in Abu Dhabi Video

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Trade unions, human rights activists and politicians have called for urgent labour reforms to protect the thousands of migrant workers building a complex of five-star hotels and museums on Saadiyat Island in the United Arab Emirates, including a new Louvre and the world's largest Guggenheim.

Trade unions, human rights activists and politicians have called for urgent labour reforms to protect the thousands of migrant workers building a complex of five-star hotels and museums on Saadiyat Island in the United Arab Emirates, including a new Louvre and the world's largest Guggenheim.

The International Trade Union Confederation and art activism group Gulf Labor have urged the western institutions involved in the project, including the British Museum, to take active steps to address the workers' welfare and press the UAE government to improve their conditions.

The calls come as an Observer investigation found evidence that the emirate's tourism development and investment company (TDIC), which runs Saadiyat, is failing to uphold its own employment policies, with workers left destitute, confined to their quarters and sent home for taking strike action. Migrant labourers building New York University's Abu Dhabi campus on the island were found to be suffering even worse mistreatment.

The investigation reveals that:

■ Companies are withholding the passports of migrant workers, trapping them in the UAE.

■ Thousands of workers are living in substandard or squalid conditions elsewhere in the UAE in apparent breach of the TDIC's pledge to house them all in its model Saadiyat accommodation village.

■ Dozens of workers were deported this year for striking over pay and conditions.

■ Workers decorating the university live in squalid conditions, with 10 men to a room, no free healthcare and some trapped because they have to pay back huge recruitment fees.

■ Mobile-phone video footage of a riot at the SAV in August shows dozens of men roaming the camp armed with metal spears and planks spiked with nails. Men are seen jumping out of windows to avoid the conflict.

■ A worker who claims he lost his leg while building luxury villas has been forced to live on the top floor of a migrant camp for a year. He only received a prosthetic leg last month and has been reliant on the Red Crescent for medical support. His claim for compensation and request for ground-floor accommodation have been rejected.

■ Louvre workers are having to work for nine months to a year just to pay back their recruitment fees. One worker who went on strike over poor wages was kept in his camp unpaid for three months and then sent back to Pakistan with 19 others.

The European council held a meeting on 4 December to discuss the growing concern about migrant workers' rights in the UAE and its neighbour, Qatar. The chair of the European parliament's subcommittee on human rights, German MEP Barbara Lochbihler, said migrant workers in the UAE, including those on Saadiyat Island, were exploited "on a daily basis".

She said: "Minimum labour standards are not respected, there are systematic complaints about poor accommodation and sanitation, salaries and medical services are withheld, and both experts and the migrants themselves report excessive police force and situations of forced labour. This is unacceptable.

"I therefore call on the UAE government, but also on all companies involved in the Saadiyat project - including [the] Louvre, British Museum and Guggenheim - to ensure that any form of mistreatment is addressed and that all migrants can fully enjoy their human rights."

Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, said the organisation was "deeply concerned by the abuses of workers' rights on Saadiyat island".

The findings reflected that labour abuses were a systemic problem in the UAE, with migrant workers suffering "extreme exploitation", including unpaid wages and excessively long working hours, she added.

Although the UAE is a member of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) it has not ratified the UN body's convention on freedom of association, which allows for industrial action. Burrow also warned the international institutions involved in the Saadiyat project that they shared responsibility for the workers' welfare. She said: "Clearly their reputations are at risk. International institutions need to be aware that if they associate their name with developments they must insist on full respect for ILO standards."

Azfar Khan, migrant specialist at the ILO, said the body was aware of the situation on Saadiyat, said although the UAE had not ratified the specific convention on strike action, it was still potentially in breach of the ILO's rules. "Even if countries have not ratified the convention they are obligated by the ILO's constitution that as member states they will not go against the article of the convention."

Nicholas McGeehan, Gulf researcher at Human Rights Watch, said: "These revelations should be a reality check for anyone who has been fooled into believing that the UAE is making progress on migrant workers' rights and they should anger the high-profile institutions who have set up on Saadiyat."

Gulf Labor, a coalition of international artists which is mounting a year-long protest against the mistreatment and exploitation of migrant workers on Saadiyat, said the findings should shame the western institutions involved.

British artist Guy Mannes-Abbott said: "The Guggenheim's image is certainly soiled. The Louvre banks millions of dollars every year for use of their 'brand', while its new museum is being built by what Human Rights Watch describes as 'forced labour'. The British Museum's role has so far escaped notice, but it should consider gifting or returning items that they will be stuffing the Sheikh Zayed National Museum with on lucrative loan agreements."

A Guggenheim spokeswoman denied that its brand had been tarnished. "We visit the workers' village each time we are in Abu Dhabi. We are satisfied with the conditions observed."

She said the museum's director, Richard Armstrong, had raised the issue of workers' rights and conditions in his most recent meeting with the TDIC last week and would continue to do so. The museum would not be discussing details of the meetings with the media as this was "a matter of cultural diplomacy," she added.

A spokeswoman for the Louvre said that, under the terms of the deal between the French and UAE governments, the TDIC held responsibility for construction and working conditions. She added that the French authorities were "particularly attentive" to social conditions on Saadiyat and would continue efforts to ensure they met high standards.

The Observer understands that the British Museum held an emergency meeting about the situation on Saadiyat to deal with adverse publicity. Attending staff were warned not to speak to the press. A spokeswoman said they would continue to review workers' rights in their regular meetings with the TDIC.

A TDIC spokesman refused to comment to the Observer. The second annual audit of worker welfare for the company by PricewaterhouseCoopers is due to be published on Sunday. Construction firms Al Jaber and Arabtec also failed to respond to inquiries.

An NYU spokesman said the university and its Abu Dhabi partners "have put into place a methodical monitoring, compliance, and enforcement system".

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Conditions for Abu Dhabi's migrant workers 'shame the west'

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Trade unions, human rights activists and politicians have called for urgent labour reforms to protect the thousands of migrant workers building a complex of five-star hotels and museums on Saadiyat Island in the United Arab Emirates, including a new Louvre and the world's largest Guggenheim.

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Workers' Living Conditions Video & Article

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Workers' Living Conditions Video & Article

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Despite five years of growing criticism, Fifa and the Qatari authorities have been accused of ongoing indifference towards systemic abuse and "appalling treatment" of migrant workers working on stadiums that will host the 2022 World Cup.

A damning new report by Amnesty International, which interviewed 132 contractors working on refurbishing the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha and a further 102 landscapers who work in the Aspire Zone sports complex that surrounds it, claimed that they all reported human rights abuses of one kind or another.

The findings will prove controversial because Qatar's Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy has made ensuring minimum standards are met on World Cup stadium projects a priority in the wake of widespread criticism of the broader conditions in which migrant labourers, who make up more than 90% of Qatar's 2.1m population, live and work.

For the first time, Amnesty said it had definitively identified mistreatment and abuses on a World Cup stadium site rather than on infrastructure projects that underpin Qatar's ambitious 2030 Vision, of which the football tournament has become an integral part.

It said that workers refurbishing the Khalifa stadium, scheduled to host one of the World Cup semi-finals in 2022, reported they were forced to live in squalid accommodation, appeared to pay huge recruitment fees, and have had wages withheld and passports confiscated. Amnesty conducted the interviews during three visits over the course of a year from February 2015.

Qatari law prohibits retention of passports, delayed payment of wages or deceptive recruitment (where workers are promised a certain wage in their country of origin only to be paid less when they arrive). But Amnesty found evidence that all of those practices remained widespread during the period in question.

The number of labourers working directly on World Cup stadiums increased from 2,000 to 4,000 in the past year and is expected to grow to 36,000 in the next two years.

The Amnesty report alleges that while the organising committee has introduced welfare standards there are "significant gaps in application" and its efforts have been undermined by indifference from Fifa and apathy from the Qatari authorities.

The stadium is part of the lavish Aspire Zone sports complex where Bayern Munich, Everton and Paris Saint-Germain trained this winter. The Welsh rugby team trained there before last year's World Cup.

Of the men interviewed, Amnesty's report found that the vast majority alleged they had their passports confiscated, 88 had been denied the right to leave Qatar, many reported their wages being paid three or four months in arrears and there was evidence that some workers on the stadium contracted to a labour-supply company "appear to have been subjected to forced labour".

It said that there was evidence of workers being threatened with non-payment of wages, being deported or - conversely - not being allowed to leave Qatar because their employer would not provide an exit permit.

It claimed all the men interviewed had taken out loans to pay for recruitment-related fees, often to agencies in their home country. The practice is forbidden by Qatari law but remains widespread.

One metalworker on the stadium told Amnesty in April 2015: "My life here is like a prison. The work is difficult, we worked for many hours in the hot sun. When I first complained about my situation, soon after arriving in Qatar, the manager said, 'If you want to complain you can, but there will be consequences. If you want to stay in Qatar, be quiet and keep working.' Now I am forced to stay in Qatar and continue working."

Amnesty concluded that the human rights abuses it documented were the result of "multiple failures" and that while there had been a belated focus on the quality of workers' accommodation by some of the companies involved, they have done little to address other well-documented issues such as deception in the recruitment process.

"The abuse of migrant workers is a stain on the conscience of world football. For players and fans, a World Cup stadium is a place of dreams. For some of the workers who spoke to us, it can feel like a living nightmare," said Amnesty International's director general, Salil Shetty.

"Indebted, living in squalid camps in the desert, paid a pittance, the lot of migrant workers contrasts sharply to that of the top-flight footballers who will play in the stadium. All workers want are their rights: to be paid on time, leave the country if need be and be treated with dignity and respect."

The report is particularly critical of Fifa's failure to exert pressure on the Qatari authorities and a "lack of meaningful action to address the issue".

The crisis-hit world football governing body has only now promised to "formalise its human rights due diligence process", vowed to change its World Cup bidding rules and has commissioned Harvard's Professor John Ruggie to write a report on its human rights standards.

The Amnesty report concludes its "actions and omissions offer little hope that Fifa plans to do all it can to ensure that the 2022 World Cup will leave a positive legacy and not a trail of human misery".

Shetty said: "Despite five years of promises, Fifa has failed almost completely to stop the World Cup being built on human rights abuses."

In the wake of a series of damning reports by NGOs, including Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, and major investigations by media outlets including the Guardian, the Qatari government commissioned law firm DLA Piper to review the issue in 2013.

It promised to overhaul the kafala system that ties workers to their employers, reform the exit permit regime and introduce new laws that required payment to workers to be made electronically.

DLA Piper reported in May 2014 but almost two years on, the government has failed to enact its recommendations in full and has failed to properly audit how many migrant labourers are killed or injured at work.

In May last year, Amnesty accused the Qatari government of "promising little, delivering less" and has said the promised reforms to the kafala system do not go far enough.

In its new report, it concludes: "The government's response raises serious questions about Qatar's willingness to protect the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers living in the country. If abuse on a flagship World Cup project does not merit investigation and action, it is unlikely abuses that do not attract the international spotlight will be dealt with in an effective manner."

The main contractor on the Khalifa stadium is a joint venture between Six Construct, a subsidiary of Belgian company Besix, and Midmac, a Qatari construction company. Other companies are contracted to carry out specific tasks, including Malaysian company Eversendai.

In turn, it used at least two "labour supply companies". They are effectively agencies that sponsor a number of migrant workers to come to Qatar and hire them out to other companies.

As the report points out, the worst examples of abuse are often found buried beneath layers of sub-contractors. The landscaping work on the Aspire Zone is being done by Nakheel Landscapes, a Qatari company. The work on the Aspire Zone is not an official World Cup project.

In its response to Amnesty, Fifa pointed out the achievements of the supreme committee in introducing minimum welfare standards, the commitment by the new Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, to integrate labour rights specifically into the bidding process for the 2026 World Cup and the formation of a 2022 Fifa World Cup sustainability working group.

"While Fifa cannot and indeed does not have the responsibility to solve all the societal problems in a host country of a Fifa World Cup, Fifa has taken concrete action and is fully committed to do its utmost to ensure that human rights are respected on all Fifa World Cup sites and operations and services directly related to the Fifa World Cup," said Fifa's head of sustainability, Federico Addiechi.

A Fifa spokesman added that dialogue over improvements to workers welfare was a "ongoing process".

"Challenges remain, but Fifa is confident that the structures and processes set up so far by the supreme committee for Delivery and Legacy, which is the entity responsible for the delivery of Fifa World Cup infrastructure, provide a good basis to monitor labour rights of migrant workers on Fifa World Cup stadium construction sites," he said.

"These processes include the workers' welfare standards in place since 2014, a compliance check for all tenderers, regular reporting that is publicly available and a four-tier system of auditing. This approach and these measures have been discussed with the key stakeholders, including Amnesty International."

The spokesman added: "Furthermore, Fifa will continue to urge the competent governmental authorities in Qatar and other stakeholders to also take action and ensure that such standards become the benchmark for construction projects in Qatar."

In a response to Amnesty, Midmac said: "We admire the work Amnesty International does and are fully committed to ensuring our entire workforce is treated with the dignity and respect they deserve."

It said that where a sub-contractor was not willing to correct deficiencies it would immediately stop any collaboration with them. It said "terminating a sub-contract agreement is the strongest message we can send to those who are found to be non-compliant".

Six Construct said it had terminated the contracts of some sub-contractors as a result of Amnesty's investigation, while Eversendai said it had stopped dealing with the two labour supply companies, had no intention of working with them in future, and would engage direct labour "wherever possible". It said it was now in full compliance with welfare standards.

Nakheel said it was committed to making improvements to its employee conditions but in the absence of Amnesty sharing relevant information "we wholly deny abuse of any of our workers on the Aspire maintenance project".

The Aspire Zone Foundation said it would be working "hand in hand" with the supreme committee to launch a number of positive initiatives across all World Cup related projects.

Qatar's 2022 supreme committee said it had called for an "immediate and comprehensive review of the application and enforcement" of its workers' welfare standards among all contractors, sub-contractors and labour supply companies.

In a statement it said that it is "committed to ensuring the health, safety and well-being of every worker on World Cup projects", that "the tone of Amnesty International's latest assertions paint[s] a misleading picture" and "the conditions reported were not representative of the entire work force on Khalifa".

The supreme committee argued that Amnesty focused on just four of the 40 companies that work on the stadium and that many of the problems identified by the NGO had already been rectified by the time it approached it with the findings some months later.

Last week, Qatar was given 12 months to end migrant worker slavery or face a possible United Nations investigation that could see it become the fifth country to face a formal inquiry by the International Labour Organisation.

The move followed an ILO delegation to the Gulf state this month that also found migrant workers stranded for months without pay and stripped of their passports.

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Migrant workers suffer 'appalling treatment' in Qatar World Cup stadiums, says Amnesty

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Despite five years of growing criticism, Fifa and the Qatari authorities have been accused of ongoing indifference towards systemic abuse and "appalling treatment" of migrant workers working on stadiums that will host the 2022 World Cup.

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Subscribe to our channel http://bit.ly/AJSubscribe Qatar, a tiny Gulf monarchy, might be known worldwide for its stunning wealth, ambitious Middle Eastern diplomacy and unprecedented winning bid to host a World Cup, but beneath the country's lightspeed rise to prominence lies a class of unprotected, often forgotten migrant construction workers whose lives often amount to forced labour.

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Working and housing conditions of the 1.5 million migrant workers constructing buildings in Qatar ahead of the 2022 World Cup have been heavily criticised.
The Gulf state has made little progress on improving migrant workers' rights, despite promises to do so, according to the rights group Amnesty International.

Qatar disputes the claims and says improvements have been made.

Here, we speak to three construction workers who have worked on sites in Qatar recently. They describe the conditions there as "pathetic" and "oppressive".

'Frank' (not his real name), 30, from Kenya

"I came to Qatar from Kenya last June to work on the construction sites here.

I got the work through an agency. I was paid $350 (£223) a month when I got here, which was a lot less than I was promised. I also spent a lot to get here - over $1,000.

I worked at sites building government schools near [the capital] Doha from June to November last year. There are a lot of infrastructure projects going on here, alongside the World Cup venues.

The main site that I worked on was not a good environment. The majority of the workers are uneducated, and the companies take advantage of them, so they cannot negotiate.

They just become helpers and are badly paid. Many just end up accepting it, as they cannot go back to their home countries, because they are supporting their families.

I am sending money back to my family. They are all looking to me, but I can't tell them what it is like here, or they would tell me to come home.

When I arrived, I was told that I would be working as an electrician, even though I am not trained, which is dangerous. I got an electric shock on the site once, but thankfully I was OK.

Conditions on the sites are very bad. You work all day out in the open in extreme heat. You start at 04:00 and work all day. There is no cold drinking water on the site, just hot water. It is very oppressive.

No-one will listen if you complain. We once went on strike because we weren't paid for a month. We were eventually paid, but the management didn't care about our complaints.

Life in Qatar is very expensive. The accommodation is provided through the company, but food and general living expenses make it hard to save anything. I try to send home what I can.

As for the accommodation, I would describe the conditions as pathetic. In the first place I stayed, Al Khor, there were 10 people to one small room, with five bunk beds and nowhere to put anything. The toilets were outside. It was all very inadequate and uncomfortable.

You also have to hand over your passport on arrival, so you can't leave. You feel trapped, like a prisoner.

I am now staying in a place called Industrial - where most of the migrant workers live. The hygiene here is very poor.

There are five to a room, which is a bit better, but it is not hygienic. I now work in a mall in sales after being allowed to leave my job at the construction sites. It is a bit better, but still not great.

Life is very hard here. I would like to see the lives of migrant workers here change. It's just a sacrifice now. There need to be improvements made to safety, salaries and accommodation."

'John' (not his real name), from Ghana

"I am a truck driver working on the site of a new port project near Doha. I came here from Ghana a year and a half ago.

Honestly speaking, we are suffering badly at the hands of our employers, especially in the summer time, as it is now.

Everyone is too scared to report any problems.
"John", Migrant worker in Qatar

It is 40-50C here during the day, but there is no air conditioning in our vehicles, and we are breathing sandy air. At times the dust and sand flows in the air like snow.

There is nobody to fight for us. For almost two months now, my company has refused to pay our salaries. Our company is killing us because they don't want to give us the little reward we deserve.

My salary of $550 a month is very low for a driver like me. We have no days off to rest. This not only applies to me - it is the same with every worker at my company.

I start at 05:00 and work until 19:00, with two hours of transportation to the site and back each day.

Qatar has a labour office, but if you report your company, they will definitely send you back to your country. So everyone is too scared to report any problems.

I'm an orphan from a poor home. I couldn't finish my secondary school education.

I have been living in cabins in camps, separated by plywood. Almost all of the workers staying in these camps, are poor and come from countries in Africa and Asia, like Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. We all experience the same problems.

About 15-20% of the workers here have achieved some quality of living standard, with a good salary, due to their educational background, or they have been able to get work through good foreign companies.

But for the rest of us, the payment of salaries is a real headache.

How I wish I could save enough money to leave here to get to Europe or the US.

That's my ambition, because in Ghana, even graduates don't have work, so imagine how hard it is for people like me who had to drop out of school."

Stephen Ellis, from Widnes, UK, worked on a World Cup site in Doha in March

"I worked on one of the World Cup sites in Doha at the end of March. I left after two weeks, because the conditions were an absolute disgrace.

I work as a pipe fitter and supervisor and have been on construction sites all over the world. These were the worst conditions I've ever seen on any site.

Most of the workers at the site where I worked were Indian. They are treated very badly, and the conditions in which they live and work are terrible.

There is no drinking water available, there is no air conditioning in their cabins - and this was in 45C heat. They have filthy sanitation, and the food is dished out like in the Oliver Twist movie.

However, what's even worse is the on-site safety, or lack of it. It does not exist, and my friends and I, who went to work there together, were horrified at the risks taken every day on the site.

We were told that before we started there, one Indian worker had been killed.

The site was run totally by Indians, and they were treating their own people very, very badly.

But the upper management did not seem to care. They were just turning a blind all to it all. We were told by English managers that if we didn't like it to leave, so we did.

There were also other Brits, along with myself, who were treated just as badly.

We were paid a lot more than the Indian workers - they were on about $50 a week, and we were on closer to $33 an hour - but we were still ripped off because we left early."

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Working and housing conditions of the 1.5 million migrant workers constructing buildings in Qatar ahead of the 2022 World Cup have been heavily criticised. The Gulf state has made little progress on improving migrant workers' rights, despite promises to do so, according to the rights group Amnesty International.

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Updated July 15, 2015 09:38:16

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The corruption scandal engulfing world football's governing body FIFA has cast a renewed spotlight on the conditions endured by hundreds of thousands of workers labouring on infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Qatar - the world's richest country per capita - is spending $260 billion building the stadiums, public transport systems, freeways, hotels and apartments to stage the tournament.

Yet foreign workers, mostly from South Asia, are being paid as little as $50 a week as the labour to build the infrastructure.

Forced to live in squalid and unsanitary conditions, they work under a controversial system called kafala, which requires them to surrender their passports to their employers.

Former ACTU president Sharan Burrow, now head of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), said the kafala system was tantamount to slavery.

And FIFA critics, including three Australian campaigners, said the scandal-plagued governing body FIFA needed to reassess where the next two World Cups should be held.

Ms Burrow, Mustafa Qadri - a London-based researcher for Amnesty International - and Jaimie Fuller - the Swiss-based Australian businessman behind the Skins sportswear brand - have all visited Qatar to investigate the working and living conditions of labourers employed on World Cup projects.

Filthy underbelly behind the glitz and glamour

Ms Burrow was Foreign Correspondent's guide on an exclusive tour of the grim underbelly of the glitzy Qatar capital Doha.

Arriving at a workers' hostel, Ms Burrow said: "You can see that on the outside this looks almost human. And then you walk in here and you see there are about 300 men here in about 20 rooms."

It was mid-evening. The courtyard of the small multi-storeyed building was festooned with washing. The men, all Nepalese, had just finished their meals at the end of another long, sweaty day.

Those meals had been cooked on filthy gas burners in a room where the floor was caked in grime and the walls consisted of breeze blocks and crumbling plaster.

"This is the cooking area, and you can imagine 40 or 50 men in here trying to prepare meals in what are totally unsafe conditions. And it's filthy, just filthy. The squalor is unbelievable," Ms Burrow said.

The labourers told Ms Burrow they had to work six days a week, eight hours a day, most often with two to four extra hours of obligatory overtime.

Most men said they were paid about 600 Qatari riyals ($215) a month plus about 200 riyals for food.

"Six hundred riyals is very, very low, even with food on top of it," Ms Burrows said, adding that the ITUC had asked the Qatar government to set a basic minimum wage.

Anxious about staying too long in the workers' hostel - and risking arrest for an unauthorised visit - Ms Burrow left the men with a promise: "We'll keep coming back to Qatar until they change the laws. Until you have proper rights, you get a fair salary and you can live with dignity."

Outside Doha 'it feels like you're in the third world'

On several other days, Foreign Correspondent went with Mr Qadri to the industrial areas on the capital's outskirts.

Many roads were unsealed and choked with heavy trucks and construction equipment.

Hundreds of men milled around a mosque and a small shopping area with no recreational facilities.

Younger workers from South Asia played cricket on a rubble-strewn wasteland.

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Mr Qadri, like Ms Burrow, stuck to the back streets, concerned about police seeing him talking to workers; he had been detained for six hours on a previous evening.

"Compare it to Doha, which is this amazing big city, and here it feels like you're in the third world," he said.

"In one of the richest countries in the world there's no proper sewerage system here, or electricity, and often there are issues with very basic accommodation.

"What really strikes me is that these are the workers building stadiums, building hospitals that in the years ahead will be the showcase for developing this country, yet this is the way they're living."

Mr Qadri spends as much time as possible interviewing workers.

"What they're saying mostly is that they're not paid on time and they're not paid enough," he said.

"And if they're not paid on time and if they complain, there's a risk of their employer going to the authorities saying, 'this worker has absconded'.

"They don't have their ID and they can get kicked out of the country or stuck in detention for a long time."

Urgent reform needed to prevent deaths

While Ms Burrow said she would like Qatar to be stripped of the World Cup, Mr Qadri felt the tournament provided unique leverage.

"We say that the World Cup is an opportunity for Qatar to really demonstrate that it is genuinely trying to improve conditions for labour," he said.

The Supreme Committee for the Delivery and Legacy (SCDL) of Qatar 2022, chaired by Qatar's emir, certainly understands worker safety is a key issue internationally.

It claims there has not been a single fatality at any of the five stadiums being renovated or built in the country.

Foreign Correspondent was allowed to film the site works for the Al-Wakrah stadium, but no-one representing SCDL was allowed to speak on camera, or even for direct attribution, about safety, workers' rights or anything else.

Ms Burrow said statistics compiled by the Indian and Nepalese governments showed more than 200 citizens from each of their countries had died each year working in Qatar.

There are fears many more will die unless there is urgent reform.

Nepalese workers 'refused permission to go home for funerals'

Mr Fuller has been campaigning for a corporate boycott of FIFA and urged the establishment of a new organisation focused on the transparency of executive decisions and financial accounts.

Having visited Qatar and arranged for himself to be smuggled into labour camps to video conditions, Mr Fuller said he was determined to draw attention to the plight of workers.

"We've seen only in the past few weeks with the Nepalese earthquake, a huge number of Nepalis have been prevented from returning home for family members' funerals because the Qatari authorities and their employers have refused to give them permission," he said.

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Speaking to Foreign Correspondent from Zurich after Sepp Blatter was re-elected president of FIFA, Mr Fuller said the organisation had a corruption issue.

"We're dealing with an organisation that really has a culture of corruption over generations, and you don't change culture by keeping the same leadership," he said.

However, Mr Fuller invested some hope in the criminal investigations underway.

"We know there are continued investigations between the US feds through the FBI and the Swiss federal prosecutors as well," he said.

"I think it's pretty self-evident that they are looking to go up the tree, so I wouldn't be too sure that Sepp Blatter will be there in four years' time."

Realistically, Mr Fuller did not expect any change in the World Cup calendar.

"It's highly unlikely that Russia [the 2018 hosts] or Qatar could be stripped of the World Cups," he said.

"I think there's a significant legal question there because certainly the amount of money that's been spent already and committed and invested in those countries is enormous."
Editor's note (July 15, 2015): The headline on this story has been changed to clarify that the report refers to World Cup infrastructure as well as stadiums.
First posted June 02, 2015 05:58:54

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Inside the Qatari 'slave' slums housing World Cup workers

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Updated July 15, 2015 09:38:16 Sorry, this video has expired The corruption scandal engulfing world football's governing body FIFA has cast a renewed spotlight on the conditions endured by hundreds of thousands of workers labouring on infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.