Why I Can't Enjoy the World Cup

It is true that I am not a big football fan, so avoiding the World Cup is no great hardship.

But I can't enjoy the World Cup because of the way my friend Karna and so many like him have been treated.

I find it disgusting that the head of FIFA - I can't remember his name which is fine by me - can draw some sort of moral equivalence between labour relations in the UK and those in Qatar. 

How many labourers have to work in 55C heat day in, day out, in Manchester? 

How many migrant workers in Birmingham are put up in a dormitory without air conditioning in the middle of the desert? 

How many migrant workers in London have their passport taken away when they arrive? 

How many watch their mates die falling off the building they are working on because they fainted in the heat, and then have to watch them get packed off home where their wife and mother have to pick them up using two luggage trolleys to give them a funeral for which they have to borrow money?

There is no moral equivalence. The reason the FIFA boss has gone on the attack is that FIFA never did any due diligence on the building of the infrastructure they had commissioned. 

And, in spite of partial reforms, the exploitation is still happening.

Karna showed me the 'contract' he had signed for the job. It was one side of A4 paper detailing his duties with nothing about their duty to him. "What to do brother?" he lamented. He left his wife and two children to cope without him.

Two years later, he returned. After paying back his friends the money they had lent him to get the job, Karna had earned £1000. 

"I survived," he said.