In my country (Australia), there's about 1.05 million people in the age group 25-29 (which I assume most migrant workers are about, so should be a good baseline proxy), and 800 deaths per year in that age range.
By that baseline, Qatar, with it's 2ish million migrant workers, should see about 1,600 migrant worker deaths per year if everything is normal.
15,000 over 12 years seems on the low side, if anything. I'd be more worried about the 37 deaths they've specifically narrowed to employees working on the World Cup. But even then, same problem. How many people are working on the World Cup? If it's 1,000, then 37 deaths is ridiculous, but if it's 500,000 all doing stuff like construction and transport, it could easily be close to the safety profile of that work in other countries.
Australia has about 200 workplace deaths per year. 40 per year in construction with around 1.1 million employed in the industry. Qatar is claiming 20% of it's migrant workforce is in construction and 10% of fatalities in that group are from work related incidents. That puts them at 62.5 per year per million workers. About 50% higher than Australia's construction industry. Which isn't great, but it's also not outrageous unless Australia is an outlier too (I haven't looked at other countries yet).
When reporting says “migrant workers have died”, I’m assuming that is in workplace accidents alone, and not including any natural deaths or other causes such as illness.
This may or may not be the case but if there was free press, we’d have the full picture.
A lot of sensational press relies on people making assumptions like that. Maybe they aren't tricking us in this case, but newspapers definitely do do that sort of thing all the time.
In my country (Australia), there's about 1.05 million people in the age group 25-29 (which I assume most migrant workers are about, so should be a good baseline proxy), and 800 deaths per year in that age range.
By that baseline, Qatar, with it's 2ish million migrant workers, should see about 1,600 migrant worker deaths per year if everything is normal.
15,000 over 12 years seems on the low side, if anything. I'd be more worried about the 37 deaths they've specifically narrowed to employees working on the World Cup. But even then, same problem. How many people are working on the World Cup? If it's 1,000, then 37 deaths is ridiculous, but if it's 500,000 all doing stuff like construction and transport, it could easily be close to the safety profile of that work in other countries.
Australia has about 200 workplace deaths per year. 40 per year in construction with around 1.1 million employed in the industry. Qatar is claiming 20% of it's migrant workforce is in construction and 10% of fatalities in that group are from work related incidents. That puts them at 62.5 per year per million workers. About 50% higher than Australia's construction industry. Which isn't great, but it's also not outrageous unless Australia is an outlier too (I haven't looked at other countries yet).