For Babu, the stakes were high. He expected to receive around $5,500 as his end-of-service benefit. Babu was told that he would be paid soon, so he waited. He stayed in Qatar as long as he could. But it didn’t come. “Finally,” Babu said, “when we couldn’t manage money, even for food, a few of us returned, giving up hope.”

Unsettled accounts

Accounts of wage theft have dogged the production of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar almost since its inception. Already in 2014, The Guardian was reporting that hundreds of migrant construction workers from Bangladesh and Nepal had gone without wages for more than a year. They had been tasked with building, of all things, the luxury offices for the tournament’s organisers in Al Bidda Tower – nicknamed ‘the Tower of Football’.

Source: Migrant workers: Qatar still to answer for mass wage theft | openDemocracy