The sterling new city set to host the 2022 Qatar World Cup final may be being built in part by the forced labor of migrant North Korean workers pressed into a form of modern day slavery by their government, according to an investigative report by The Guardian.
Qatar World Cup site being built by ‘forced labor’ of North Korean workers, per report
A report by The Guardian suggests that North Korean workers in Quatar’s Lusail City are having up to 90 percent of their wages retained by their government.
Warren Little
The report claims that North Korean laborers employed on the construction site of Lusail City are receiving as little as 10 percent of their wages while working abroad, with the majority of the income being funneled back to government officials and the country’s ruling Korean Workers party. Rather than pay their laborers directly, the state-run construction companies that employ them reportedly send the money back to the government.
Workers are told the money will be sent to their family or given to them after their return to North Korea. The workers themselves seem unsure about whether they will ever be paid.
“I don’t get paid. The company gets the money,” one worker told The Guardian. “When I go back to North Korea I’ll get paid, I think.”
Others were more emphatic. One North Korean defector who worked as a migrant laborer in Kuwait in the late 1990s said, “The construction company that employed workers sent all the money directly to the North Korean government’s bank account.”
The allegations of forced labor present a major issue to a Qatari government that has already received heavy criticism for mistreatment of migrant workers helping the country prepare for the World Cup.
Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International, said that the conditions for North Korean workers in Qatar likely constitutes forced labor, a human rights violation.
“It is simply a further dreadful indictment of the dictatorship in Pyongyang, which exploits the vulnerability of its citizens to enrich itself in collusion with the Qatari autocracy.”
The Qatari government told The Guardian it has not received any recorded complaints from North Korean workers about their treatment or pay and that, “Qatar is determined to continually improve labour conditions for all who work in the country.”
Defectors groups estimate there are up to 65,000 North Koreans working in 40 countries worldwide, with roughly 3,000 of them in Qatar.
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