"I told them there was some sort of mistake."

March 19, 2024 8:58 PM

When Azeez Sulaiman arrived in Qatar, he thought he was going to play football. Instead, he ended up forced to work in construction, in dangerous conditions and for meager wages. But a new calling emerged from these trying circumstances: advocating for the rights and safety of his fellow workers. Writer Anthony del Col and graphic designer/graphic novelist Deena Mohamed help to tell Sulaiman's story.
posted by Jeanne (3 comments total)

We are failing very badly, globally, at building societies and financial systems that reduce the incentive to treat the vulnerable with incredible cruelty and carelessness and so that is what we get - vulnerable people treated with incredible cruelty and carelessness.

We should be taking whatever steps we can to make the people who profit from these exploitations social and financial pariahs. The problem is worldwide (and I will readily concede that likely nobody who is sitting at a computer browsing Metafilter has completely clean hands) but it is much worse in some places than in others and the Gulf States in particular deserve consequences.

Though I also hoped the story would include some mention of consequences for the agent in Ghana who, I am reasonably confident, knew that he would not be playing professional football when he got there.

The scary part? This guy's experience was considerably better than many you can read about. He doesn't describe being deprived of his travel documents, he was allowed to leave eventually, he wasn't killed for organizing for better conditions.
posted by Nerd of the North at 9:43 PM on March 19 [21 favorites]

unrelated to this particular story, please let me extremely strongly endorse Deena Mohamed's graphic novel Shubeik Lubeik/Your Wish Is My Command, because it is incredibly great
posted by DoctorFedora at 1:31 AM on March 20

There are certain corners of the internet where it's reasonably common for people to post "I got this job offer in the UAE, is it a reasonable wage?" (and it's always a fairly baseline pay, would require roommates) and then dozens of people piling in to say oh god no it's the UAE they're gonna take your passport and stick you in a shipping container.

...point being, maybe very slowly word is getting around (to those people who have internet, anyway) but then even so there's people getting enslaved in Cambodian pig-butchering scams, Nepalese finding themselves on the front line fighting for Putin when they thought they were gonna be a cook, and on and on and on.

Being desperate already sucks enough as it is; that there are so many terrible people just waiting to take advantage of your desperation, in every possible way, is just grim.
posted by aramaic at 7:28 AM on March 20 [5 favorites]