The FIFA Voluntary
Labor Camp has opened for people to give even more of their lives to
the International Overlords. I know that this is a “customary practice” but
when FIFA is anticipating profits in excess of $3.5 billion for the month long
tournament, it is obscene to think that in a country that has a minimum MONTHLY
wage of R$622 (US$311), that FIFA has the gall to not pay people to work
for them. Worse is the total success they have in doing so! The first days of
volunteer enrollment there were tens of thousands of inscriptions. No doubt the
meals, transportation and uniforms will be worth the trouble. It’s no small
trouble:
Volunteers must
agree to work 10 hours a day for 20 days = 200 hours of labor.
If a working week
is 40 hours, that is 5 weeks of free labor per person.
Each host city
needs at least 1,500 volunteer-slaves. 1,500 x 12 = 18,000
18,000 serfs x
200 hours = 3,600,000 hours of free labor for FIFA.
3,600,000 hours
= 90,000 weeks = 22,500 months = 1,875 years
You get the
picture.
Let’s put this
in economic terms. Each person laboring for the Brazilian minimum wage for five
weeks would earn R$777.50 for five weeks of work (a pathetic hourly wage of
R$3.89). Multiply this by the number of laborers and we get R$13,995,000 or
around US$7 million. With profits estimated in the billions, why does FIFA demand
free labor? Seven million dollars doesn’t seem like so much to pay and if you
actually threw some job training in there, people could use the event for
something useful other than a t-shirt made by
nimble Cambodian fingers.
The minimum
wage in Switzerland is US$23. Let’s pay our Brazilian volunteers that wage
and see how much FIFA continues to crow about sustainable practice. It would
still only amount to 828 million dollars – a modest contribution to Brazil
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