"More laborers will die during construction [of the facilities for the 2022 Soccer World Cup in Qatar] than the footballers who will step on the pitch," says Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). Her "solution": a Twitter campaign to the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) execs, calling for a vote to move the World Cup unless migrant workers in Qatar are given the right to organize unions.  The bosses must be shaking in their boots!

Capitalism is deadly the world over, with or without unions. In the US, where workers have had the "right" to organize unions since 1935, 4,628 workers were killed on the job in 2012—that's 3.4 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers. In Qatar, it's 5 workers per 100,000.

Conditions in Qatar are extreme. Migrant workers from Africa, South and Southeast Asia make up at least 90% of the workforce. Women household workers, who live as domestic slaves, are often subject to sexual abuse. Men are usually housed in unsanitary, overcrowded dormitories, forced to work long hours in blistering heat, as gardeners, janitors, and increasingly as construction workers to build the stadiums, roads, hotels and other infrastructure planned for the World Cup.

Kafala: Another kind of slavery

Many have their passports confiscated, or are subject to contracts from which they cannot escape. They can't change jobs or leave the country without the consent of the sponsor of their visa (a system known as kafala).

Last November, Amnesty International put out a report that condemned the abuse of migrant workers in Qatar. Since then, the United Nations and a bunch of other agencies have hopped on the bandwagon, issuing reports condemning the government of Qatar and the construction companies for the deaths of construction workers and inhuman working and living conditions in the country.

This isn't new. The Bangladesh Daily Star published an article in 2005 called "SOS from Bangladeshi workers in the Gulf" that exposed the exploitation of blue-collar migrants. International agencies have been publishing these reports for years.

Paper Reforms Can't Hide Real Slavery

But all of a sudden, with the World Cup approaching in 2022, there's a campaign for the right of trade unions and the end of the kafala system. The Qatari government has made the confiscation of passports illegal and on May 14 announced that they will propose a law ending the kafala system. But workers aren't fooled. These are just words. The laws are created for the benefit of the bosses and their profits. Whether they are enforced or not, the workers will still be enslaved by capitalism.  Only communism will put an end to all forms of slavery. 

So-called human-rights organizations are calling for an end to slavery—but capitalism by its very nature creates slavery. The extreme poverty and absolute lack of jobs in countries from Somalia to Bangladesh means that workers are forced to migrate for their own and their families' survival. The debt bondage that migrant workers face in Qatar is in many ways just a more extreme form of the wage slavery that all workers face under capitalism. Even if you can quit one job, you have to find another or you starve.

Polite protests at FIFA meetings can't change the nature of capitalism. Competition creates a race to the bottom in which the most vulnerable workers around the world are faced with the most extreme exploitation. Worldwide capitalist crisis has made this worse.

Workers Need Communist Revolution

 Neither trade unions nor new laws will change the life of the working class. It will take a revolution to achieve a world where the working class can organize itself by communist principles. In a world where production is for need, not for profit, everyone will have meaningful work and decent living conditions, and no one will have to abandon their family to send them the means of survival.

Immigrants do 90% of the janitorial, construction and cooking work in Qatar. Some are reading Red Flag. When they organize massively to fight for communism, uniting with workers around the world, we can put an end to capitalist wage slavery and finally build the world we deserve, a communist world.

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