"Jobless during FIFA world cup, Qatar migrant workers face challenges despite labor reforms", 3 Dec 2022

Instead of landing a higher paid job as a driver, [Zarak] Khan was forced to start working as an ordinary laborer at a construction site in Qatar ... [but] the construction site where he worked was forced to shut down three months before the World Cup started, and he has been out of a job for more than three months ...

Khan [could barely] afford to eat in recent days. He is also afraid to go back to his home in Pakistan because he did not make enough money to pay back the $3,600 loan he took when he left ...

During a TV interview this week, Qatar World Cup chief Hassan Al-Thawadi admitted that about 400-500 migrant workers had died as a result of working on projects related to the tournament ...

Following reforms to the kafala system in 2020, migrant workers in Qatar [are now] allowed to change jobs at any time, after a notice period of up to two months ... [but enforcement of the new rules remains an issue] ...

"They introduced a law which said they [the employer] shouldn’t keep your passport. But it wasn’t really enforced", [says migrant worker rights activist Yasin Kakande] "By the time I left the country, about 90% of the migrant workers still didn’t have their passports. I still have friends there who told me that they still didn’t have their passports."