Is anyone planning on watching the World Cup this year? Do you think this is worse than normal, in terms of the host country's track record?
I always try to catch as much as I can, I really enjoy it, but this year in particular it seems nauseating.
I always try to catch as much as I can, I really enjoy it, but this year in particular it seems nauseating.
I was born in Brazil and over there the World Cup is an event with massive following, to the point where schools and companies allow for off-days or at least dismiss people to watch the national team matches.
I simply can't watch this time, morally it has always grated how fucked up FIFA is but I think this was the tipping point for me.
Unfortunately I don't see this point of view being shared by most around me, not in Brazil and not here in Sweden. It puzzles me a lot.
I know someone who built tailor made accounting software for employee tracking involved in the process. This was 5-6 years ago. They did their usual thing but the client came back to them and said they were missing a column for “deaths”. They dutifully added one. He quit the company shortly after.
For them it’s just accounting. These are people from India, Bangladesh who work there under desperate conditions.
Qatar has 2 million migrant workers. The 6500 is taken over several 10 years, according to the Guardian article that nathanaldensr posted in a parallel comment, but to make sure I'm not going easy on Qatar I'm going to assume they took place over 2 years.
6500 deaths over 2 years in a population of 2 million is a death rate of 162 per 100k.
I assume that the migrant workers skews young, so let us compare that to younger people elsewhere. I tried to compare to some of the countries that many of the migrant workers come from but had trouble finding non-paywalled data. So I'm just going to compare to the US.
The death rate in the US for males 15-24 is 100 per 100k. For 25-34 it is 177 per 100k. For 35-44 it is 257 per 100k.
The Qatar death rate then doesn't actually seem to be high. It seems to be reasonably inline with what you'd expect from the sheer large number of migrant workers there.
Improving working conditions vs letting workers die in Qatar is a curve they resolve towards letting workers die.
It would be interesting to compare working at Qatari construction vs other dangerous jobs.