Saudi, migrants, and FIFA 2034: Interview with Nicholas McGeehan

Setting the Stage: Saudi, Migrants, and FIFA 2034 Lovely Argentina, champions of the world Guitar, recruited hundreds of thousands of workers, mainly from India, Nepal and Bangladesh, and once they got to Qatar, they were already in debt and trapped in a system known in the Middle East as kafala. The kafala system can be a form of modern day slavery and. Speaker 1 The features of it. Speaker 2 The amount in some. Speaker 1 Cases to forced labor. Speaker 2 The host of the FIFA World Cup 2034 will be Saudi Arabia. Speaker 1 Welcome back listeners. In our last episode, we examined the rumours about Saudi abolishing Kafala, its employer tied visa sponsorship system, which turned out to be fake news. Today we're going to talk about Saudi and sport as it gears up to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup. Join me as I chat to Nicholas Mcgeehan, founding Co director of the organization Fair Square. Stay tuned. Hello, Nick. Good morning and thanks so much for being with us today. To all of our listeners, I have with us Nicholas Mcgeehan, who is the program director at an organization named Fair Square. So hello, Nick, and very, very excited about the conversation we're going to have. Speaker 2 Hi Namrata, thank you for having me. It's an honour to be welcomed. Speaker 1 On we're thrilled to have you here. So perhaps we could start off, Nick, with what are the issues you found in Qatar and then perhaps we can extend what what parallels you see or don't see in Saudi as well? Unpacking Qatar's Human Rights Catastrophe for Workers So Qatar wasn't really on the international map in any real sense until it won the right to host the FIFA World Cup in 2010. The winner to organize the 222 FIFA World Cup is Qatar. So they had about 12 years to prepare for it. They didn't really have any stadiums. They didn't have the infrastructure that was required to host an event of that size. And so they embarked on this huge construction spree to overhaul the country's infrastructure, to put in place the stadiums that were necessary and the hotels, of course, to accommodate all the guests, supporters that would visit. Because, you know, tremendous reliance on foreign workers, mostly South Asian workers. They had to import hundreds of thousands, millions of workers, extra workers to make this all possible. And unfortunately, the labour system in Qatar, as and the rest of the Gulf states is deeply abusive and exploitative. So this was, to some extent, I think, an opportunity for rights groups and trade union groups to sort of shine a spotlight on what was happening and to try and push for change, meaningful reform that would better protect these workers. You know, there are some people who came out of that experience and pointed to some legal reforms that existed on paper and look at it as a success in terms of what we achieved. And certainly I think that that narrative has crept into a lot of the reporting of the Qatar World Cup. I think the reality is it was a human rights catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young men were brought in to make that tournament possible. And, and yeah, and these people were treated abysmally. Far too many of them suffered serious injury, loss of livelihoods, unpaid wages, and far too many of them just didn't make it home at all and left families with no answers as to how they died and financially impoverished and destitute. Speaker 1 Thanks, Nick. And I think that so many organizations like yours and human rights folks like yourself, as well as trade unions, as you mentioned, help shine a spotlight on this happening in the 1st place because I think perhaps many people didn't know how bad it was prior. That's the sense I had. Saudi 2034: FIFA's Influence and Kafala Abuses So a couple of things. So you mentioned Qatar. I mean, can you tell us where things stand right now with Saudi? Have they been awarded the World Cup and and what's the situation in terms of the Saudi labour system? Are you concerned that there will be some parallels between Qatar and Saudi? What's your take overall? Speaker 2 Sure. So Saudi Arabia has wanted the World Cup for a long time. They started, you know, manoeuvring, shall we say, with FIFA a long time ago and tried to get their name attached to a future World Cup. They were eventually awarded the tournament formally, I think, in December last year. The process whereby FIFA awarded the right to host the 2034 Men's World Cup to Saudi Arabia was really quite remarkable in the sense that FIFA bent its rules, changed its rules and in some cases actually broke its own rules in order to make sure, firstly, that Saudi Arabia was the only bidder for the tournament and then to ensure that it was awarded the tournament without a vote by the FIFA Congress. So that speaks, I think, to the level of influence that Saudi Arabia has been able to accept over FIFA. Now, the way that they do that is by they are essentially FIFA's most lucrative sponsors. Saudi Aramco will now be the main sponsor of FIFA as an organization. And they've also been able to sort of indirectly channel massive amounts of broadcasting revenue into FIFA in the last year. So they are one of its biggest benefactors. And this is all usually relevant, of course, because the amount of infrastructure that's going to be required for Saudi Arabia is, again, I mean, it was jaw-dropping in Qatar and it's the same in Saudi Arabia. They're going to have to build, I think it's 11 new stadiums and refurbish 4. They're going to have to build 73 new training sites. They're going to have to build broadcasting centres. There's going to be an increase in 500% of the hotel capacity and there's an increase in capacity of the airports from I think it's 95,000,240 million annual passengers. The labour system in Saudi Arabia is basically the same as the labour system in Qatar, the same as the labour system in the UAE, same as Oman, same as Kuwait. You know, essentially these Gulf states all have the same system which ensures that employers have vast amounts of power over the non national employees that they bring in. It is underpinned by serious racial discrimination and it yields appalling results from, you know, as the ones I described earlier in Qatar, the most series of which are obviously loss of life. But the general day-to-day treatment of migrant workers is appalling. The word slavery is often thrown around in relation to migrant workers. I personally have no problems with that issue being used as long as it's used precisely and then correctly. And I think in many cases, I think what we are talking about is a system that facilitates and enables enslavement. Now, these are obviously in the worst types of cases, right? It would be ridiculous to say that all migrant workers in Saudi Arabia are slaves. They're not. But does the labour system, is it so abusive and exploitative that it enables their enslavement? Yes, I think it does. And so we have nine years out from the Saudi Arabia 2034 World Cup with all this infrastructure to be done and with little to no saying that they're going to put in place the significant labour reforms that you would need to actually completely alter the power dynamic that exists between the workers who come from places like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. In fact, pedestrian India are the 2 main providers of low paid migrant labour to Saudi Arabia, and there's nothing really in place to protect them. So you know, coming out of the experience of Qatar 2022 with some disappointment and looking forward to the Saudi 2034, the main sentiment is just trepidation bordering on horror at what could be about to unfold. Historical Roots of Racism in Gulf Migrant Labor That sounds so worrisome, Nick. And perhaps one of the things that came to my mind was that it sounds like quite a big contradiction because on the one hand, you have all of this massive infrastructure, which sounds like things which require a hell of a lot of capital. And on the other hand, you have these workers who, you know, are essentially being put in, as you said, almost like slavery, like conditions, especially in certain circumstances where we look at it and we say, oh, this is forced labour. These are other forms of modern slavery. So I suppose I wanted to ask you, is, is there some lack of care from the side of the authorities what's going on there? Because it seems like they're quite capital flush, right? Speaker 2 Yeah, Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So back in the 60's, the foreign labour that existed in the Gulf tended to come from Arab states. So it would come from, you know, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, places like that. And the Gulf states at the time were quite worried about that to some extent because what was happening was that these workers were coming from places that were quite politicized. And this is an era of increasing sort of pan Arab nationalism. And they, the Gulf states, were terribly concerned about the idea that they might bring into the country political actors who would then sort of engage in the type of political activism, trade unionism, for example, that might put them in jeopardy, that might bring in a demographic that would pose a political threat to them. It was around this time that they shifted entirely and they pivoted to South Asia, where they could essentially bring in all of the workers that they need to fulfil these economic projects and plans that they had. That's been vast amounts of workers started coming in from India, from the Philippines, from Pakistan, from Bangladesh. And what happened there was that these workers were culturally distinct, you know, religiously often distinct, linguistically distinct. And so they became essentially an underclass to an extent that workers from Arab nations were never likely to be. Well, that is fostered in the Gulf is this system of structured and stratified racism, I would say, where you have the Gulf nationals at the top, often accompanied by Western wealthy expatriates and other wealthy Arab expatriates. And then going down the scale, you have different levels of workers from impoverished South Asian countries and increasingly East African countries. And all of them are subject, unfortunately, to this appalling racism that exists. And to be honest, I think that's why people generally don't care because they've been able to bring these workers in cheaply, they're able to pay them very little, which results in them being housed in sort of shanty towns essentially on the outskirts of these big, fancy gleaming cities like Dubai and Doha and Riyadh that we see. The workers don't live in anywhere like that. They live in dusty, unsanitary labour camps. And So what you end up with is this sort of stratified society. On the one hand, wealthy golf nationals, you know, wealthy expatriates with the five star hotels and fancy cars and so on and so forth. And the flip side of that is this underclass of unpaid workers living in unsanitary conditions and not, you know, being paid well at all. So it's created this two tier society and the racism that fosters I think is ultimately what leads to people not caring about what happens to workers. I mean, I was a WI, lived in Abu Dhabi for four years. And the thing that struck me and the thing that I was horrified by how many of the Western expatriates displayed open contempt and openly racist attitudes towards the migrant workers, the type of stuff that they would never consider seeing back home in the UK. It was open season and that stuff there. So. So it's a long rambling answer to say the answer is racism, unfortunately. Speaker 1 No, thanks for your candle, Nick. And that's the thing, right? I think that it's necessary to call it as it is and aside from human rights, sort of groups and unions and all of that in different parts of the world, including from the region, I don't necessarily always see it called out like that. So I'm glad you said so. And I think that happening back to that history of what was happening in the 1960s and thereafter, you know, I suppose this is also coinciding with NASA's time and Pan Arabism and things like that. Because again, to my knowledge as well, it sounds like the Gulf states have typically also been quite an outlier to that. And thereafter, that has also caused tensions between them and citizens of other Arab states who perhaps envision alternative futures for themselves where they sort of forge their own futures, right? Like rather than essentially be under monarchs. So exactly. Yeah. So that's that's very interesting. So thank you for that. And I recall that you had done a bunch at fair square of reports, which was really fascinating on heat. So could you talk a little bit about heat and heat impacts on workers? I mean how does this also link with sport and people maybe working outside in the heat? Tragic Reality: Heat Stress and 'Sleeping Death' Sure. Yeah, Well, it's sort of the issue that fascinated us was workers deaths, the stats that were coming out and worker deaths. There's a lot of talk about this in the run up to the Qatar World Cup and what we looked at it and were sort of surprised by was that everyone was talking about numbers. Yeah, 1500 workers have died, 4000 workers will die, etcetera. You were getting sort of statements like that and estimates like that, but nobody was saying, well, how are these workers dying and to what extent is negligence a factor? Now, having lived in the Gulf and having researched what happens to my workers, I mean, it's no surprise that workers are dying. You know, they live in appalling conditions. They must be incredibly stressed. The heat is just, it's jaw-dropping. If you've ever sort of experienced it. It was very hot in Qatar. It got up to 52°C the first year I was there. I used to sweat in the. Speaker 3 Exact way as if it. Speaker 2 Was raining from the sky. Do you know how hot 52°C is? It's 125°F. If you build a stadium in that heat, you should get to own it. And so the idea that these workers would die and get sick just didn't seem a surprise. And yet there was no real data on it. There was nobody sort of going into this and actually digging into what are the causes of death and what protection is in place. And heat's really interesting because to be honest, it's the risk where you can most easily and accurately identify the gap between the protection that should be on offer to anyone who's outside working in the heat and the protection that is on offer. The protection that the Gulf states offer basically is they put a ban on work in the middle of the day in the hottest months of the year. That's basically it. It's this kind of semi arbitrary blanket ban on all work at certain times where they consider the risk to be highest. It's an absurd way of approaching risk from heat because the risk from heat in the Gulf can be exceptionally high outside of these times and outside of these hours of the day. I mean, take, if you take July, for example, and somewhere like Abu Dhabi, you know, what you might find is that in July the daytime temperature would be, you know, anywhere up to 4546° at night time, that will go down, yeah, it will go down to maybe 31, which is still pretty hot. But what you find in the night time is that the humidity will shoot up from something like 2030% up to 80%. And the risk from heat to workers is a combination of the air temperature and the humidity. It's a combination of those things and a couple of other factors. And what happens when you do proper risk assessment by drawing on climate data that you can very easily draw on from multiple pretty accurate sources. And when you map out the risk, it is just quite remarkably high for extended periods of time throughout the year as the protection, the ban on work is in place for a very small amount of time. Upshot is you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of workers who are outside at times when the climate poses serious material risk to their health, if not their lives. Now, unfortunately, despite a lot of work that was done on the Qatar World Cup in relation to this issue, they put in place a pretty shoddy heat protection ban and Saudi Arabia doesn't have a better one. So it's not the only risk. I mean, I think it's important to say that there are other multiple risks associated with poor health and safety, poor living conditions and ability to access healthcare. That's a huge problem in the Gulf. You find lots of workers that only Healthcare is, for example, taking Panadol, which is good for a headache, but it's not something you want to be taking on a consistent basis for all sorts of ailments. So all of these things are interlinked, but heat is the one, as I said at the start of the answer, where you can easily identify a very obvious lack of protection. Yeah. Speaker 1 Thanks, Nick. That's so illuminating. And it also reminds me of this conversation we had when we interviewed A researcher who works a lot on heat, national plans relating to heat here in India. And essentially what he was saying is even things like your basic tree cover can reduce, like there's a politics around shade. Speaker 3 Shade is a privilege. It is an elite commodity. And one of the things we did in this study recently was trying to figure out a little bit about where the state plants its trees. And we had some very candid answers from some of these bureaucrats who are in charge of urban inforstation programs. And they said, look, we have, I don't know, 300,000 trees that we want to plant, and we're meeting our targets. But the problem is the trees are being planted in areas where there are no people because that's where the land is. If you wanted to actually plant a tree where the heat is and where the people are, you run into pretty stiff roadblocks right at the outset because that land is hugely contested. It's hugely valuable. You can imagine the prospect of planting a tree is going to be a political thing. Speaker 1 One would think that everyone has equitable access to something like standing beneath a tree, but that is seldom the case because our cities are so designed in such an inequitable way. And obviously, like what you were describing of different cities in the Gulf, you were talking about Abu Dhabi. I'm sure that is extremely stark there and it must be quite bad even within workers quarters, right, in terms of ventilation and things. Speaker 2 Exactly. What's fascinating to get heat, I mean, the science behind it. I mean, it's not that complex, right. And as you say, Abu Dhabi doesn't, you know, really, you know, the construction sites that they operate in, in the Gulf, you know, you would have great concerns about the extent to which they have that type of shade. It's compounded, as you addressed, by the lack of air conditioning. So the time when the body is supposed to recover from a hard day's work is at night when you sleep. Yeah. And the only way you can do that is if your quarters are cooled and ventilated. So what you often find is that, unfortunately, the workers don't have air conditioning or the air conditioning is malfunctioning. And one of the great concerns when you speak to people who are experts in heat stress, which is fatal in many cases, and you ask them, why are so many workers dying in their sleep? And the response is, well, it could be to do with the fact that this is the period of time when their bodies are supposed to be recovering and actually aren't. There's a phenomenon which migrant workers in the Gulf talk about, which is sleeping death. Because so many of their colleagues go to bed and then just don't wake up and they die in the night. Now, there's no science to establish definitively that that is what's killing them. But I've spoken to multiple experts on heat stress throughout years of working on this. And certainly the hunch that many of them have is, well, that is probably related to the body's inability to cool down after this incredibly intense and arduous day of work in the heat, and then being put into a place where the body should cool at night, the sleeping quarters which are not themselves cooled. Speaker 1 That is deeply tragic, right Nick? I hadn't heard of this sort of sleeping death before. And it sounds so sad because essentially someone who must have been toiling all day is essentially finally laying down to sleep, or at least so they think, and then they pass away. That's awful. And I'm. Yeah. And I'm sure that that's their family is most of these must be young, single men, right? Because their families are back home. Speaker 2 Typically young single men. And then the further tragedy, you know, to pile tragedy upon tragedy is that that work will be just written down as natural death. There'll be no investigation done into it. There'll be no examination of the extent to which it might have been related to work in unsafe conditions in the days or weeks leading up to the death. There'll be no examination of the extent to which living quarters were properly cooled and ventilated. That won't happen. There'll be no medical history for the patient because he probably hasn't been to a hospital or a clinic his entire time there. You know, a 25 year old son, husband, father, they could have put themselves into an incredible amount of debt to get that person the job in the Gulf. And then suddenly one day he turns up in a coffin and that's all that's written on the coffin. They have no information on it. And there's no recourse to the type of compensation that a death through an accident, you know, might yield the family. So it's, and this happens again and again time and again in all the Gulf states to all sorts of national Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Kenyans. It's really quite a horrendous situation given how relatively easy it would be to put in place basic protection and basic investigation to ensure that workers don't die. And if they do die, we find out how they die. And we ensure that the families get the compensation that they deserve and the people who are responsible are properly sanctioned to put in place some sort of deterrent effect to stop it happening to another young man in his family. Speaker 1 That is so deeply upsetting and I think it sounds like a situation where all of these destination countries, Saudi included, and we're talking about Saudi because of the 2034 World Cup that's going to come up. I think it sounds like a circumstance where there are people who are in dire need of jobs, often from these different, for instance, South Asian countries. And then they are put in these circumstances because they're sort of praying on their vulnerabilities, right? Listeners do stay tuned. We'll be back after this short break. So. Watch the video story Inside Bengaluru's power looms, migrant lives running on shifts and dust only on the migration story.com for the Masters Tools We'll never dismantle the Masters house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. An excerpt from an essay by Audrey Lord. I mean, moving from given that the circumstances are so dire and there is some time, I mean, obviously the situation sounds very dire, but there is some time now in the lead up to the World Cup, what would you suggest like to different actors? So for instance, what are the sort of reforms one would expect of the government of Saudi to make sure that what we saw on Qatar doesn't happen in Saudi also, you know, this kind of thing and countries from whom or from where immigrants tend to go. So whether it's India, Bangladesh, Nepal, so on, what are your recommendations in general? Pathways to Reform: Dismantling Kafala and FIFA's Role Yeah. I mean, the situation is dire and yet the hope derives the fact that it can be fixed that these are incredibly wealthy nations who would have to invest tiny, tiny fraction of their wealth to ensure that these workers are are properly protected. And also from the fact I think that, you know, the South Asian origin countries, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal are in a position of leverage over the Gulf states because they supply them with about 80% of their workforce, of course. So it's more than that. In fact, it's probably, well, it's about 80%. It's huge. Essentially, these countries would cease to function if South Asian countries stop providing them with labour or if South Asian labourers stops doing the work. So what needs to happen is they need to essentially dismantle what's known as the kafala system. Kafala system is a system of sponsorship based employment that ensures that employers rather than the state, are responsible for the welfare and the right of their workers. That's been in place since the British actually put in place in Bahrain, I think in the 1920s. As ever, the British are the root cause of of many of the world, so that needs to be dismantled. It's tricky. It's a technical task. It wouldn't just require law changes. It requires shifting thinking about how migrant workers are treated. It would require a lot of work done on educating people on the dangers of racism. It would require a lot of work done on humanizing migrant workers, and part of that would involve paying them more and putting them into better housing. So it's not simple task by any matter of means, but it is entirely doable. The other thing that would have to happen in the short term is you need better protection from heat. You need to make sure that workers have access to hospitals and can get the care that they need in a timely fashion. Again, all of these things are doable. The Gulf states have some of the best healthcare systems in the world, if not the best. It's just that migrant workers can't access them. The question is how do we get all that? And that's more difficult. The Gulf states, there is no political pressure on them, no serious political pressure on them to put these reforms in place. In fact the type of labour model, the kafala based model that they have had in place for so long is actually being imported into the West. I would say increasingly the UK for example, where I'm from, you see lots of workers on sponsorship based type agreements, low paid workers, incredibly vulnerable to worker exploitation and with, you know, ineffective recourse to the state mechanisms. So it is not as if we have been in any way successful in breaking down the kafala system. If anything it's more powerful and more entrenched. So it's a difficult situation. One of the things that I think I've been saying for a long time is don't expect Western NGOs or the Western media to be able to apply enough pressure on this issue via the World Cup to make any meaningful difference. By and large, you know, people in Western states don't care about Indian workers being abused in the Gulf. I think, you know, the hope I have is that the leverage that South Asian states have or sorry, the influence that they have can be effectively leveraged. But that would require the type of public outrage in places like India and Bangladesh and Pakistan that we have yet really to see. Speaker 1 So one of the actors I didn't ask about previously was FIFA in a little more detail. So when you were describing their role, for instance the FIFA Congress in the context of Qatar, you sounded a little bit honestly, you sounded a little bit miffed, like they could have done a lot more. So, so, so perhaps. And it sounds very rightly so. So what should FIFA be doing in the days to come, ideally, rather than the current role? What's your take? Speaker 2 Right, you picked up on me being this definitely, definitely was what FIFA should do. So, OK, what FIFA should do is it should offer the World Cup to countries who are willing and able to build, you know, to prepare themselves in a manner that is consistent with basic human values of dignity or if you want to be technical about it, international labour standards and human rights law. They could, for example, go into Saudi Arabia and say, yes, you can have this World Cup. Yeah. But in order to debt that we need you and we need to see that you have reformed your labour system, that you're going to protect all the workers who are coming into that labour system. So we're going to use our leverage. Yeah. You can have this tournament, but only under certain conditions. Yeah. And these conditions are XY and Z. Now, they do not do that, and they have never done that. And the reason they don't do it, well, you have to look at FIFA's business model essentially for that. FIFA only makes money one year out of four, and it makes money every time they host a men's World Cup, predominantly. I mean, there's a women's World Cup too, but it's nowhere near as lucrative. The men's World Cup is the real money spinner for them. It's how they make all their money. And so they make their money from sponsoring the tournament or people sponsoring the tournament and people paying for the TV rights for the tournament. That's how FIFA makes this money. They pass on all the costs of building the tournament to the host. So FIFA's not paying for these stadiums or these roads or all the stuff for the hotels. Saudi Arabia's paying for all those things and FIFA doesn't care how much they pay, doesn't care how many very lucrative construction contracts get paid to the also family or their allies in Saudi Arabia. They turn a completely blind eye. All they care about is that they make as much money as possible from the tournament. The other thing they want is they want tax breaks from the hosts. So all of the money that's made in, for example, US 2026, which is hosting next year's World Cup, that will all be tax exempt for FIFA. And the same will go from Morocco in 20-30. Spain and Portugal are Co hosts there. They'll be getting tax exemptions on that. So they invest. The reason this is relevant, they invest all of their political capital and influence with hosts in making sure that the tournament looks as good as possible for the sponsors and the broadcasters and making sure that they get as much tax free revenue as possible. So they are never going to go to the host and say sorry, could you make sure that these workers are protected or sorry? Could you make sure you know that there's no police violence around the stadium or that you don't clear out St. traders around the stadium? They're not interested in doing that and they never will. And so you have a situation where this big organization goes around the world essentially enabling the worst instincts of whatever host government is in place, directly contributing and exacerbating the human rights abuses that could coexist with the type of tournament and exerting no positive pressure whatsoever. And in fact, I think the only way that we could see a positive impact from 2034 realistically in this time frame is if we are successful in putting some pressure on FIFA to essentially overhaul how it is run and how it is governed. Speaker 1 So I have another question for you in terms of human rights due diligence. So obviously one of the things that has come up a lot in recent times is this idea of having some kind of due diligence system which is premised on human rights. HRDD, Kafala Rumors, and Essential Media Recommendations So would you say that supposing you're first of all, it would be useful to hear a little bit about what that system looks like? And the second is, do you think like, so for instance, if you're constructing a stadium, there should be some type of human rights due diligence standards applied to that in wherever it is in the world, as you were saying, global N global South. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it does make sense because the thing about sporting tournaments is that they have to be. And this is what's different about other construction products, right? When you build a bridge, yeah. You say it's going to be ready in 2024. Yeah, if it's ready in 2025, it's not great, but it's not a problem, right. But when you say you're going to deliver a tournament in 2024, Yeah. And it's going to start on June the 1st, 2024. It has to be delivered then. Yeah. So the time frame for a mega sporting event is completely different from the time frame for any other type of construction project. You're not allowed to overrun because then the whole thing falls apart. So there is tremendous amount of pressure on the organizers and on the people building it and a tremendous incentive, therefore, to cut corners, whether it's labour rights or any other factor that could be in play. So human rights due diligence in the context of mega sporting events does make sense. It's like, OK, how are we going to make sure that this tournament, which has particular risks associated with it, as mitigation steps in place? Yeah. And it is up to, you know, the governing body, whether it's FIFA or the International Olympic Committee, to demand human rights due diligence plans from the organizers. OK. So you're going to build this stadium, OK. How are you going to do it? How are you going to protect the people who build it? And how are you going to protect the people who work in it for a few weeks while this tournament is on? That's essentially what the human rights due diligence says. So I think there is value in it. I think it makes sense to have them. The problem, I think was a couple of problems. One, it only works if you're serious about it. Yeah, and I don't think FIFA is serious about it. I don't think the International Olympic Committee are particularly serious about it. I think it is something that's been foisted on them. And I think it is something of a box exercise for them. Obviously there are people within these organizations who are serious about it. But if at any point the human rights due diligence process impacts on the commercial aspects of the tournament, we know who's going to win out in that fight. And it's not going to be the human rights, it's going to be the commerce guys. You know, these things have to deliver the revenue to fulfil the business model upon which they're based. So I don't think the sports governing bodies are serious about them in the Gulf context. I think they're hugely problematic. I don't think you can go into the Gulf where it is the Wild West, where the labour system is concerned, it's anything goes. There essentially is no regulation. You can get away with more or less whatever you want in the Gulf context and so the idea that you can go in there and put specific protection around a specific tournament ignores the reality of the wider depredations of the labour sector. So again, I think there is value to human rights due diligence practices where businesses are concerned. I think they have often times limited utility and value. But when it comes to mega sporting events, I think there is a bigger need for them, but also a lack of institutional buy in to what would be required to make them effective. And in the Gulf context, I just don't think they'll ever be effective. Speaker 1 Thanks, Nick. And it sounds very myopic, right? Because it's on 2 levels. One is the question of basic human decency where you don't ever want to have someone abused in this manner, regardless of where they come from in the world or you know, what is their nationality, race, gender and so on. And then the second side of this being myopic is that it clearly has happy healthy workers always make for better outputs too. And I think that so many institutions have learnt this the hard way and the fact that they can't see the financial repercussions of that too, though we shouldn't have to look at it through that lens, but it shows how short term is they are in their view as well. I think that I know I've kept you for a long time. So perhaps we can wind up with two questions. The first is a more serious one about this recent rumour that ran through the rumour mill, which was about Saudi abolishing kafala. I had spoken to Vani about it briefly, but what's your take? Is it ever possible for that to happen? That's one. And then the second, on a lighter note, if you have any like book suggestions or something like that which you enjoy and made you think about all the amazing work you've done on sport and human rights, So over to you. Speaker 2 Well, I don't think Saudi has abolished the kafala system. It looks like APR trick. I mean, I was most amused to see myself quoted in an article in which I supposedly commented on Saudi Arabia having abolished the kafala system by an outlet to whom I had never spoken. So I think Saudi Arabia is doing what Cathar did, which is trying to get out the narrative that it's abolishing kafala, but actually not doing the hard yards of picking it to pieces. Of course they can. I mean, there's there's no reason why they couldn't abolish it and there's no reason why they couldn't put in place a basic system that protected the rights of everybody in the country. And, you know, obviously there would be, you know, workers are always going to be abused and low paid jobs. It's just a reality. But there is no need to have such an abusive system in place to keep these workers under such appalling levels of control. So hopefully at some point we will see the end of that book. Suggestions. Oh God, you remember my blood run cold there because I'm thinking like what if I read recently? Speaker 1 What about movies? Movies or I don't know, something with pop culture. Speaker 2 There's a really good movie on and it sort of combines football and workers rights called The Workers Cup. Speaker 1 This is not life, man. Speaker 2 It's like you're trapped. Speaker 1 Or something. Speaker 2 Which is tremendous piece of work about a tournament that was set up for the workers building the Qatar 2022 World Cup. And it follows the various teams as they try to progress through this tournament. And it's a really glorious film because it sort of celebrates the humanity of these young men. And they're just utter joy at being involved in a football tournament that gets them away from the drudgery of their everyday lives. I actually used it as an advocacy tool and the run up to Qatar 2022 rather than sort of showing a report to somebody. I would be, you know, watch this film. This film will give you a bitter grip of what's going on there and why it's so unjustifiable and unforgivable than anything. So I would highly recommend that to anyone who's interested in it. And I'm going to put a plug out for a video we did on Heat, which is called Matchstick Men, which you can find on YouTube. Put in Matchstick Men Fair Square and you can see this little animation. Speaker 3 My uncle used to say that there are three types of people dead. Speaker 2 Alive. Speaker 3 And those in the desert he called his Gulf experience. Speaker 2 A trial by fire. Speaker 3 Many lives are extinguished. Speaker 2 Some like she's done by a glorious Indian graphic novelist called Apple Pen. Speaker 1 Wonderful. Yeah, I I'm a fan of up Upen as well, so we'll definitely hyperlink these Nicks so listeners can follow up with those links as well. And I think that's a wonderful note to end on the nick. This has been such a fascinating conversation, very sort of humbling in terms of thinking the road that lies ahead, but it also sounds like there are so many concrete things that can be done. And I hope that all of the stakeholders that you alluded to actually think of the things that can be done because there is time in the lead up to the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia. But thank you so much. Keep up the amazing work and we will keep following you for more. Speaker 2 Thanks Namaza, Thanks for having me on Pleasure. Speaker 1 Check out our website wwww.themigrationstory.com for more content. You can subscribe to our podcast on YouTube and Spotify. The audio editing and sound design is by Akshay Ramohalli. Stay tuned for more stories on Migration