Slaves delivering Qatar's World Cup

The fact that FIFA awarded the 2022 World Cup would have been bad enough with the heat of the time of year it will be held and its human rights and LGBT offenses. But now it appears that the immigrant population that is building the infrastructure to host the event is being held in slave-like conditions.

Forty four young Napalise men died in a little over two months in June-August. They are not being paid and have their salaries retained to stop them running away. They are also not being allowed free water as their toil under the hot desert heat and are often left hungry as they work 12 hour long days. They also have their passports confiscated and not receive ID cards mean that their status officially is that of illegal immigrants, yet they are the workforce that is enabling Qatar to develop.

Will FIFA step in to this situation?

Sadly I doubt it, our world governing bodies are proving that while they are willing to talk to the talk about human endeavour and equality they are very reluctant to walk the walk when their decisions are found to have given their prestige events to someone who is not just less than perfect but so far from perfect that they should have known about the possibility in the first place of the controversy that would ensue. FIFA is probably not about to back heel the Qatar bid into someone else's net.

Cardinal may have a point about slavery and equal marriage

Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme Cardinal O'Brien when asked wan't equating equal marriage with slavery a bit too far said:

"it is a very, very, very good example as the what might happen in our own country at this time"

So let us look at what happened in the lead up to the abolition of slavery. As you may know the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 brought and end to Slavery in the UK. What you may not be aware of is that they could have been a abolition some 26 years earlier when there was the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807, however the Lords were rebellious including some of those who were Lord's Spiritual who spoke against the end of slavery. Some of those Bishops are recorded as saying slavery was indeed biblical and had provisions laid out and nothing in the Bible calling for its end.

The abolitionists started out with the non-conformist Christian people like William Wilberforce, a Quaker, like nine of the original committee of twelve for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Mehtodists like John Wesley joined their cause, along with Baptists and other denominations who joined behind the call to end slavery.

The established Church dragged its heels on this issue and indeed even spoke out against the changes. Does that sound rather familiar to the cause that Cardinal O'Brien wishes to draw our attention to now? The Church of England much later in 2009 apologised for its implication in the slave trade. This was both through its ownership of slaves as part of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and through Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter who received compensation for the 665 slaves he owned in 1834. That compensation equates to almost £1million pounds worth in today's money for the Bishop and around £500,000 for the Church itself.

So if the Cardinal's analogy truly is a reflection of where our society is heading where are the Quakers who were at the forefront of ending slavery on equal marriage?

The answer is simple, they are at the forefront of wanting to offer equal marriage, not merely civil marriage but the same religious celebration they offer to any Quaker.

So before we get to harsh on condemning the Cardinal for linking the case of slavery with equal marriage. Let us consider whose stance we in the UK followed on slavery. Maybe what might happen in this country at this time is once again to follow the path of those who worship by waiting on God, rather than hearing the sounds of their own voices repeating liturgy.

Tesco find a conscience via their complaints folder?

According to the Grauniad Tesco want the Department of Work and Pensions to change the nature of the scheme in which people will work in private sector firms for up to 8 weeks, with only the offer of an interview at the end of that time.

In comes after a week that the company who takes one pound out of every SEVEN £8.50 spent in the UK faced accusations of further profiting from slave labour. Having worked in retail  I know that someone can be trained to restack shelves in a morning. They can learn to operate a till in a similar period of time. The additional time that is required to get people up to speed is spent on knowledge of stock and gaining that.

Of course I started in retail as a Christmas temp, less than 8 weeks before Christmas. I was up to speed in a couple of days, I was then offered full time work after Christmas and have trained up many people to work in a retail environment since. It didn't take eight weeks for the manager of my branch of H. Samuel to offer me a full time position. I rose to have areas of responsibility in the chains then largest store on Shaftesbury Avenue when the chain was cutting back on staff I was moved to another branch, retained and given new responsibility because the Area Manager had also learnt that I had potential.

Yes we should be giving people the chance to experience work, but like Waterstones who have now withdrawn from the scheme it should be with the end goal of there being a job on offer. Therefore it should be a short apprenticeship to prove you are ready and able to work for that company. Not a means by which the government is forcing you to take action, and may remove the meagre Job Seekers Allowance you are on if after the first week but before the maximum eight you leave the position. That is the enslavement element. That is what Tesco now do not want to be associated with.

However, the telling part in the Grauniad article is this:

Supermarket group Tesco said it has asked DWP officials to make the work experience scheme voluntary after thousands of angry customers wrote in and posted messages on Twitter and the company's Facebook site accusing the multinational of profiting from hundreds of thousands of hours of forced unpaid work.

So it appears that the sudden outpouring of compassion may only have come with one eye of the profit margins.


The Lib Dems stood for Parliament saying:

• Scrap the arbitrary target of 50 per cent of young people attending  university, focussing effort instead on a balance of college education, vocational training and apprenticeships.
• As part of our immediate job creation package, fund 15,000 new places on Foundation Degree courses and fully fund the off-the-job costs of adult apprenticeships, which currently have to be met by employers, for one year.

We were talking about apprenticeships as ways to get people back into work. This scheme is not an apprenticeship it is work experience which can result in you losing benefit if you drop out of it (probably because you don't like that particular experience or possibly for health reasons).

We need to create jobs, whether that is via apprenticeships or whatever route, not merely give people the experience of work without anything at the end of it for them.