I simply disagree, wholeheartedly. I think it's very much comparable. In no way is prison labor for far below minimum wage an outlier in the US. It is not at all an outlier that working those jobs is often mandatory or practically mandatory for inmates. (You can go to work or you can sit in solitary.) Absolutely deplorable conditions like those seen in tent city prisons in places like Arizona, Texas, and Nevada are not outliers.
There are laws that are "supposed to stop" the worst of the abuses in Qatar too. In response to worker protests they enacted regulations requiring a minimum wage and outlawing practices like requiring employers' permission to change jobs, seizing the passports of migrant workers to secure their recruitment debts, and so on. It has changed nothing. In reality those regulations have been rarely if at all enforced, according to groups like human rights watch and amnesty international.
Migrant workers from places like Nepal and Bangladesh were (and still are) forced into substandard housing with up to 8 people living in a single room by zoning laws, very much mirroring the development and continual existence of shitty housing for poor and migrant workers in and around major cities in the US and elsewhere (ever heard of Slough?) "Anti-vagrancy" laws criminalize the very state of being homeless in many major cities in the US. These kinds of abuses are perpetrated against the poor under color of law every single day in every single Western country, yet you call it "whataboutism" when someone points out that they are not at all unique to countries run by people who don't look like you.
terrorpaw t1_ix5ltiw wrote
Reply to comment by obscuredreference in In honour of FIFA, who are absolutely not corrupt bastards by daveclampart
I simply disagree, wholeheartedly. I think it's very much comparable. In no way is prison labor for far below minimum wage an outlier in the US. It is not at all an outlier that working those jobs is often mandatory or practically mandatory for inmates. (You can go to work or you can sit in solitary.) Absolutely deplorable conditions like those seen in tent city prisons in places like Arizona, Texas, and Nevada are not outliers.
There are laws that are "supposed to stop" the worst of the abuses in Qatar too. In response to worker protests they enacted regulations requiring a minimum wage and outlawing practices like requiring employers' permission to change jobs, seizing the passports of migrant workers to secure their recruitment debts, and so on. It has changed nothing. In reality those regulations have been rarely if at all enforced, according to groups like human rights watch and amnesty international.
Migrant workers from places like Nepal and Bangladesh were (and still are) forced into substandard housing with up to 8 people living in a single room by zoning laws, very much mirroring the development and continual existence of shitty housing for poor and migrant workers in and around major cities in the US and elsewhere (ever heard of Slough?) "Anti-vagrancy" laws criminalize the very state of being homeless in many major cities in the US. These kinds of abuses are perpetrated against the poor under color of law every single day in every single Western country, yet you call it "whataboutism" when someone points out that they are not at all unique to countries run by people who don't look like you.