WASHINGTON—A coalition headed by the AFL-CIO is demanding that soccer’s international governing body set minimum labor standards for the cities hosting the 2026 World Cup, which will be held in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
Seventeen U.S. cities are bidding to become one of the 10 selected by the Federation of International Football Associations to host matches during the world’s biggest sporting event. Six cities in Mexico and Canada will also be chosen. The 2026 World Cup will be the first one held in three countries, and the first one expanded from 32 to 48 national teams competing.
The worker-rights coalition also includes Human Rights Watch, Jobs with Justice, the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante in Baltimore, and the Independent Supporters Council fan group. Its demands include fair living wages, strong workplace health and safety protections, limitations on temporary work, strong investigation and enforcement mechanisms, responsible-contractor bidding requirements, and agreements to give workers a voice.
“What we’re talking about here is meaningful standards — not the federal minimum,” says Lee Strieb, a research and policy specialist with the AFL-CIO’s international-affairs team.
In general, there are two main criteria for labor rights related to major sports events, Andrea Florence, acting director of the Sports and Rights Alliance, told LaborPress on Zoom from Sao Paulo, Brazil. First, mitigating labor-rights violations that happen because of the event, such as contract workers being cheated out of wages. Second, advancing labor rights in the countries where they are taking place.
How cities deal with the event’s overall impact on residents is also important, she adds.
The 2026 Cup will be the first time FIFA has included human-rights standards in its criteria for selecting host cities.
“FIFA remains steadfast in its commitment to protect and promote human rights across football, and to use the popularity of the sport to help foster still wider positive social change around the world,” a spokesperson told LaborPress. Its selection process, they added, “is designed to ensure that candidate host cities engage with their local stakeholders in various human rights areas in the development of more concrete plans to live up to these human rights obligations. We were pleased to see local labor representatives included in the majority of them, and oftentimes being positive about the engagement and the opportunities this 16-month process presented.”
The coalition says FIFA hasn’t actually made any solid commitments. “We are concerned by FIFA’s insistence that it bears no responsibility to ensure baseline human rights protections across prospective host cities,” it wrote in a Dec. 27 letter to FIFA President Gianni Infantino. “FIFA has not only thus far put cities on the low road, it won’t commit to hold itself to meaningful human rights standards, even though it will exercise direct control over substantial areas of the World Cup.”
“FIFA itself is doing a lot of contracting,” says Streib. Even though no new stadiums will be built for 2026, it is hiring contractors for other construction, food service, event staging, and hospitality. The coalition says bidding cities have to sign over control of “many of the most basic decisions” related to “relevant core city infrastructure, including airports, public transportation, stadium and training facilities, hospitality, and more.”
“FIFA has the power here to insist on minimum standards,” says Ashwini Sukthankar of the AFL-CIO’s international-affairs team. But so far, she adds, the coalition has been able to meet only with “corporate social-responsibility consultants,” not real decision-makers.
Human-rights issues at major international sports events, says Florence, have included repression of gays and lesbians in Russia, host of the 2018 Cup, and police brutality and the mass evictions of neighborhoods to build stadiums in Brazil, host of the 2014 Cup and the 2016 Olympics. But the choice of Qatar as the site of the 2022 Cup has spotlighted labor issues.
More than two-thirds of the country’s 2.8 million residents are migrant workers, mostly from South Asia, the Philippines, and Kenya. Under the “kafala” system, they are effectively indentured servants.
“Foreign workers are enslaved,” the International Trade Union Confederation wrote in 2014. They are “owned by employers who hold the power of recruitment, total control over wages and conditions of employment, the authority to issue ID cards (not having an ID card can lead to prison) and the ability to refuse a change of employment or an exit visa to leave the country…. Poor migrant workers living in squalor, are forced to work long hours in unbelievable heat six days a week.”
An investigation by the British Guardian newspaper in 2021 estimated that more than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka died in Qatar from 2011 through most of 2020. It was only able to link 37 of those deaths directly to construction of the seven new World Cup stadiums, but said many fatal accidents are misclassified as “non-work related,” and other deaths come from working in the extreme heat or dangerous housing conditions.
If solid requirements are not stipulated in the bidding process for cities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, says Strieb, “bottom feeders” will be able to win contracts and pay workers as little as possible, provide weak or no safety and health protections, and use subcontracting to insulate themselves from responsibility.
The proposals presented by the 17 U.S. cities bidding are “all over the place,” says Sukthankar. The coalition says only Houston has presented a strong community-benefits agreement.
Houston’s proposal, submitted last June, said the city could quite feasibly set a minimum wage for World Cup-related jobs of $15 an hour or the prevailing wage, whichever is more; extend prevailing-wage requirements to sectors beyond construction; and establish clear mechanisms for handling violations, with independent third-party monitoring. It discussed those issues with Hany Khalil, head of the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation; the Houston Gulf Coast Building and Construction Trades Council; the Fe y Justicia Worker Center; and the Workers Defense Project. They urged that contractors’ wage and safety records be screened early in the process.
But Atlanta’s proposal, for example, was more vague. It said the city would “ensure workers earn a living wage while working to prepare and support the tournament,” and that it would “advocate for the strengthening of federal and state protections,” work to protect the rights of immigrant workers, and “work to create and support a network of employment discrimination lawyers.”
The coalition has not yet established strong connections with unions and other social organizations in Canada and Mexico, says Sukthankar. In Canada, she adds, conditions for contract workers at airports will be a major issue. In Mexico, it will be getting workers represented by independent unions instead of those that sign “protection contracts” favoring employers. But wage standards are similar across the country, unlike the U.S., where significant wage differences — a $7.25 an hour minimum in Houston, $17.27 in Seattle — might be a factor in head-to-head bidding.
Wage standards are much lower in Mexico, though. Its minimum is about $8 a day.
“We need to raise that floor,” says Streib
