3,600,000 hours of free labor for FIFA.

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’s economy.  Or, as a colleague of mine has suggested, let’s get all of the COPA 2014 team on board with the national spirit and have them volunteer 5 weeks of free labor. Aló Ministro Rebelo! I know you are a member of the communist party, but this is really going too far! Let’s all  be good capitalists here, not feudal serfs.