Soccer-Rights groups ask sponsors to press FIFA, Qatar on migrant worker compensation

China Mengniu Dairy

20/09/2022 16:17

Sept 20 (Reuters) - FIFA's partners and World Cup sponsors
must urge world soccer's governing body and the Qatari
government to compensate migrant workers who suffered while
preparing the nation for the event, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International and FairSquare said on Tuesday.
    Qatar has faced intense criticism from human rights groups
over its treatment of migrant workers, who along with other
foreigners comprise the bulk of the country's population.
    Qatari authorities did not immediately respond to a request
for comment from Reuters about the rights groups' report.
    The government of Qatar has said that its labour system is
still a work in progress, but denied a 2021 Amnesty report that
thousands of migrant workers were still being exploited.
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    Last week, a YouGov survey of more than 17,000 fans from 15
countries -- 10 of them European -- commissioned by Amnesty
showed 73% of respondents would support a proposal for FIFA to
compensate migrant workers, while 10% opposed it.  urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL4N30L34R
    Minky Worden, the director of global initiatives at Human
Rights Watch, said that sponsors should use their "considerable
leverage" to apply pressure on FIFA and Qatar to fulfil their
responsibilities to workers.
    "Brands buy rights to sponsor the World Cup because they
want to be associated with joy, fair competition and spectacular
human achievement on the field -- not rampant wage theft and the
deaths of workers who made the World Cup possible," said Worden.
    The three human rights organisations said they had written
to FIFA's 14 corporate partners and World Cup sponsors in July
and that four of them -- AB InBev/Budweiser, Adidas, Coca-Cola,
and McDonald's had indicated their support for ensuring remedy
for workers.
    Ten other sponsors -- Visa, Hyundai-Kia, Wanda Group, Qatar
Energy, Qatar Airways, Vivo, Hisense, Mengniu, Crypto and Byju's
-- have not responded to written requests to discuss
tournament-related abuses, the organisations said in a statement
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/20/fifa-world-cup-all-sponsors-should-back-remedies-workers.
    In May, Amnesty and other rights groups had called on FIFA
to earmark $440 million to compensate migrant workers in Qatar.
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    FIFA said then that it was assessing Amnesty's proposition
and that workers had received payments of a total $22.6 million
as of December 2021, with an additional $5.7 million committed
by contractors.
    It added last week that a wide range of measures had been
implemented in recent years to improve protection for workers in
Qatar, which will host the World Cup from Nov. 20.

 (Reporting by Shrivathsa Sridhar in Bengaluru, Editing by
William Maclean)
 ((Shrivathsa.Sridhar@thomsonreuters.com;))