The Sound of the Devil Drill: on the price of Megaprojects
By Ben Threadgold
Humanity?
“More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago, the Guardian can reveal.”
-The Guardian
What matters more, lives or money?
The memorial to the September 11th attacks in New York has 2,983 names. Each name is engraved as such that they lay adjacent to members of family, company or friends. A flower is laid out for every birthday, and the names of the lost remain on bronze planchets.
It is a place of profound and absolute grief; its burden laid on innocent shoulders.
The Qatar football fields bear no memorial.
Beijing Olympic Stadium does not account for the deaths that “reached into the hundreds”. Russia jails a reporter for claiming 18,500 Uzbekistani lives were the price of construction over four years in the country.
It is an idiocy that an act of terrorist destruction and foreign hosting of a sporting event garner opposite passions, for we should grieve the same for the utter abuse of human life. The victims' bodies can be found - the migrant workers are not. That is why estimates are so madly varied; the talk of “an estimated” or “potentially” in regards to dead migrant workers show only how much construction companies care.
Someone who does care is French architecture team “Week”, who have designed 4.4km high monument to industrial sin; each of its large and layered bricks represent a life lost in Qatar from 2010 onwards, after Qatar was proclaimed to host the world cup and spent six and a half billion USD on the construction of its ten stadiums. The media coverage of this design has been minor as it is obviously impossible with modern techniques that such a building would ever be finished - that alone is a testament to the situation in that such mausoleums are never completed; those who die will remain a growing number - a feature reflected in the eerily placed, 4.4km high cranes that starkly contrast the otherwise monotone structure. Global ire may have drawn towards the exploitation of human life occurring in Qatar but the international community shows apathy towards the problems caused by influential countries with labour issues.
Such issues, those of Russia, China and UAE, are given not only apathy, but support. How recently did you go to Dubai? Did you notice the seemingly endless number of construction workers? Did you question how often they appeared? Eight million migrant workers were only given some labour rights for the first time in 2017. With pathetic enforcement, they will suffer. Babel will continue being built, over and over, on the purchase and commerce of the Western Wealthy; Dubai remains highly rated despite its appalling rights issues due to its one, ambrosial export: Oil.
Three quarters of all UAE export money, one hundred and twenty-one billion USD, are in mineral fuels. It is a globally depleting wealth that the UAE, Russia and China can still provide. It is an economic prop on which the world stands, and most global organisations turn blind eyes towards wherever can provide the ichor on which our lavish lifestyles are run. Such lavish lifestyles are frequent inspirations for what these countries wish to replicate. As such, we should do better to promote healthier work ethics in our countries, for I wonder how many estates rely of the stipends of inhabitants to keep functioning? How many of our homes, especially those built in times recent, are fit to last the next decade?
In the end, are we even fit to set an example?
