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by kickling 1634 days ago
If you look at the work related death rate among workers in the US the number is 0.035 per 1000 people. So if the deaths are work related, it is a huge number compared to the US at least.

[https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm]

1 comments

If we assume 100% of deaths over this 9 year period work workplace accidents, then yes, this number is alarming. However there's just no way that all of those deaths were work related. We can't know the true number, since there's a lack of trust towards the number provided by the Qatari Government. In the U.S. there were 2,854,838 deaths [1]. The report you linked claims 5,333 of those deaths were work-related. That means 0.18% of deaths in the US in 2019 were not work related.

Now I concede that the U.S. has much better workplace safety guidelines, with OSHA and the like, compared to less developed nations. So that percentage would surely be much higher in Qatar, but how much higher? If we assume that 5% of deaths were work related in Qatar, then that 0.72 overall mortality rate becomes 0.036 per 1000 people, same as the US, with its much better workplace safety guidelines, while assuming a 29x greater percent of deaths being workplace related.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-08-508.pdf

You're forgetting that those non-Qataris are almost all migrant workers, so the population is extremely skewed towards relatively healthy 20-50 year old men. Also, people aren't just worried about directly work related deaths, but about bad living conditions in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar

Yes, there’s no way to know if those deaths are work related because Qatar’s government, despite its modern health care cannot figure out a cause of death for all their migrants. It’s even harder to know if these deaths are work related because Qatar has a verified history of arresting journalists and deleting the interviews where they try to find out the truth.

Does any of that strike you as a problem?

Or heck, do you ever think that Amnesty International is better equipped to make statements than you are?