21,000 people seems like a massive amount of dead. I know that Saudi Arabia and other gulf states abuse foreign workers horribly, but can the death tool really be that high? That works out to 3,000 per year. That seems incredibly high. How can that only be coming out now?
> 21,000 people seems like a massive amount of dead. I know that Saudi Arabia and other gulf states abuse foreign workers horribly, but can the death tool really be that high? That works out to 3,000 per year. That seems incredibly high. How can that only be coming out now?
Enormous numbers of people die very frequently without coverage from mainstream corporate media. Your surprise is mostly from the fact that whatever outlets you would expect to be the watchdogs for this sort of thing, haven't been barking.
There have been guerilla documentaries on slave labor in the gulf for years. I believe the one I saw was Vice. They had people working 12 hour days in the sun with no breaks and sleeping in metal shacks with no A/C in the desert.
I think something like 5,000 civilians have been killed in Myanmar with very little western coverage. Not sure how many have been killed in Sudan in the last year but it is in the tens of thousands. Both of these cases have millions of displaced people as well.
I get that those are wars and this is just slavery, but I'm just trying to make the point that unless you go out of your way to consume media outside the mainstream you'll probably miss a lot of this stuff. It is incredibly shocking when you first hear about it.
Compare it to the deadliest job category in the US, transportation workers, which sits “14.6 fatalities per 100,000 FTE workers” or ~1.5k/10M/year https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm Construction is #2 on that list.
So 3k per year is for 10M workers is twice as deadly for a less dangerous profession, but with worse safety standards, poor treatment, and inherent risks from extreme heat it doesn’t actually sound unrealistic.
It isn't? Maybe the issue is coming into the light now in the US because Saudi Arabia and US historically been close pals, regardless of the human rights abuses, so maybe there hasn't been a push to "expose" them to the general public in the US until know?
I remember reading about Indonesia being pissed off at Saudi Arabia because many of the Indonesian workers died after going there, and Saudi government didn't seem to really give a crap about the workers. I think I read about this back in 2010 the earliest or something, in Swedish media.
It been known by the western world for a long time already.
For what it's worth, that number isn't terribly far off from the roughly 1 in 200 worker fatality rate for the construction of the Hoover Dam in the USA. It would be even closer if we assume for the sake of argument that only about half of Saudia Arabia's foreign workforce is working directly on Vision 2030 projects.
And way lower than the rate of about 1 in 25 indicated by the article you linked on the Canada railway.
I had written a longer comment but deleted it and I am posting this instead.
It's about value of life. And no, not all lives are worth the same at all!
You still need hint? Here's something from this article:
> more than 21,000 Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese workers have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017
Adding to that - it's common knowledge here. Such news came out in International magazines/news as well (and keeps coming out) - you must have missed them, or it didn't register.
you are forgetting it's a moving target i.e. the dead worker gets replaced with a new worker without the number of foreign workers increasing
but it either is well in the range of expected death tool if you ever looked into the working conditions and other aspects
so it's not really "coming out now", it's more like nearly no one cared when it was bad in the past and got slowly but increasingly worse over the years
Saudi Arabia is the country that was alleged to have killed migrants en masse at its border with Yemen. Don’t be shocked that their interest in human rights and thus working conditions is inexistent: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/21/saudi-arabia-mass-killin...
Could it be that [social] media is too biased? It seems obvious to me that if you look at countries around the world, you’ll be astonished by our “global ignorance". It would be a great exercise if we had new tools to measure things at a macro, worldwide level and not just issue-oriented perspectives.
According to the article, this is 21000 deaths over 7–8 years ("According to the exposé by ITV, more than 21,000 Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese workers have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017"), and these are probably almost entirely young working-age men, because in most places (I don't know specifically about Saudi Arabia) migrant workers are almost entirely young working-age men. In the US, looking at the Social Security Administration's actuarial life table at https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html, 18-year-old men have a death probability of .0011 (0.11%) per year, and 28-year-old men have a death probability of .00233 (0.233%) per year. 0.11% of your number of 10 million people per year, over 7 years, is 77000 deaths, and at 0.233%, it would be 163100 deaths. These numbers are many times higher than the 21000 deaths actually reported here.
So, on that basis, we would conclude that not only is it not "approaching what one would expect in war zone", it's one third of the death rate for young men in one of the world's richest countries, one which has virtually no slavery problem. That is, it's three times safer to be a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia than to be an average young dude in Springfield. So, yes, the death [toll] really can be that high. In fact, it could be many times higher without any job-related deaths at all.
However, your number of "10M or so" is all foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, not just the ones working on Saudi Vision 2030. So, on that basis, it's entirely possible that the number of workers working on Saudi Vision 2030 is much smaller than this 10 million. Maybe we're talking about 3000 deaths per year out of only 1 million workers, or 0.1 million, which would be really alarming!
There were similar reports during Qatar's construction of facilities for the 2022 World Cup. Digging into the sources of the numbers in those reports though showed that they were (1) for the entire population of foreign workers in Qatar rather than just those working on the World Cup projects, and (2) counted all deaths rather than just work related deaths.
The death rate for those foreign workers turned out to less than the death rate for 15-34 year old males in the US. I compared to 15-34 year old males because I figured that foreign workers in Qatar, especially those working on World Cup construction, would tend to be male and younger.
I'm going to take the number of foreign worked in Saudi Arabia as 6 million. That's lower than the number you cited from Wikipedia, but that number is a few year old and has been going down. 6 million seems closer to the current number. I'd rather be low than high because being low on the population size gives a higher death rate. Too high is better than too low when you are trying to check if a death rate is worrisome.
If that 3000 per year turns out to be among all foreign workers and for all causes, like the Qatar numbers, that would give a death rate of 50 per 100k per year.
That would be pretty low. For comparison US death rates for males 15-24 and 25-34 are 127 and 251 respectively, and for females in those age groups they are 49 and 109.
That's low enough to be hard to believe, so a more detailed look into the data is called for. I haven't found any more easily Googled data, so what just follows is speculation.
One possibility is that unlike the Qatar numbers the Saudi numbers actually are only for workers actually working on Saudi Vision 3030 and/or only includes work related deaths. That would lower the denominator and raise the calculated death rate.
Another possibility is that the numbers are like the Qatar numbers and workers there really do die at a lower rate than do young people in the US. Offhand I can think of a couple things that might contribute to this:
1. Many of the jobs for migrants are known to be physically hard. Maybe it is mostly only people who are in very good health who take those jobs.
2. Saudi Arabia greatly restricts alcohol and enforces this with very harsh penalties. Same with drugs. A significant chuck of the US young person deaths are alcohol or drug related and those kind of deaths should be almost entirely absent among the foreign workers in Saudi Arabia.
I mean, it's not. There have been estimated death tolls available for years, but people don't ever care. You can safely assume that once this documentary is released, people still won't care.
Let’s not pretend they aren’t effectively slaves even if the are remunerated to some degree, the liberty of a lot of these people in a country like Saudi is almost zero. If I were India (for example) I’d be wanting to make sure people working abroad still were able to leave and hadn’t had passports confiscated and agreed pay disappear at the very least.
It feels like the solution is, to my privacy ideal dismay, biometrics so that you don't need the passport. You show up at a checkpoint, you're identity proofed on the spot, you get to leave, even if you need to be escorted to the plane by your country's in country diplomatic team.
I can already show up at a US embassy or consulate anywhere in the world and provide them my passport serial number to have a new one cut in an hour if I've lost mine, the gap to close is not big policy wise. Otherwise, we're relying on "magic government credential" which can be held hostage to hold a human hostage. Silliness.
It's going to be harder than expected, as it's sort of a tradition in the region, unless you hail from a particularly powerful country like the US.
My father worked in Kuwait as an engineer and his passport was locked in a file cabinet at the office, which was unfortunate because he had to fetch it while avoiding gunfire when Saddam Hussein's forces attacked in 1990.
It was worth it though, as the document saved his life when Iraqis mistook him for an American and wanted to execute him on that basis.
If you're India, and you had surplus of young men who would other wise be unemployed and restless in India, you'd want them to be stuck abroad sending remittences back for as long as possible. I wouldn't underestimate the coordination and indifference of labour supplying nations.
There has been a bunch of info on Dubai's relationship with foreign workers [1, 2], so it does not surprise that Saudi has the same problems.
Underneath the veneer of mid-east progress, there are bodies buried underneath skyscrapers.
The most frustrating part -- I am south asian and my family thinks that Dubai is admirable. when I show them docs that say otherwise, they collapse into a state of denial.
Everyone travelling to, enjoying holiday in, or visiting events in Saudia Arabia, the UAE and gulf states with a comparable state of development has their blood on their hands. Yet still, people - especially in the tech industry - tend to romaticize and frequent some of these places. Absurd.
That part of the world is regularly throwing out 7 figure offers to the right folks (turns out there is WAY more levels to the tech world above fintech if you're in the right spaces). Everyone has their price and the middle east knows how to meet anyone's.
Absurd is the amount of hypocrisy that is likely loaded in your statement unless everything you have ever bought or used wasn’t knowingly made in some sweatshop.
You won't believe (you probably will, actually) how quickly Western people there adapt to "the way things are" in those countries. They promptly get a maid for themselves, do the passport thing "just in case", abuse them physically and sexually, etc.
Funny thing is how most of these people would identify as liberal back in their home countries. They casually talk about women rights and abortion and whatnot on their living rooms while their maid is sleeping in a dark basement with no ventilation a few meters from them. It's nauseating.
I lived in Saudi for four years and have experienced this first hand. Contrary to what you'd expect, Saudi nationals are generally more measured with regards to these things. Anglos and Europeans, "first-world" people in general ... they just lose it, it's like a fetishistic thing. It probably is an actual fetish for them as many of them do rape their maids and/or ask for sexual favors from them.
inb4: "Oh, those are bold accusations where is your hard evidence, show me statistics and high-definition videos of all those maids that you claim are being raped daily. I just did a Google search and found nothing, you must be lying. Blah, blah, blah."
I don't know why people are keep down voting every comment that is trying to ask what does this number include. Is it the number of work-related accidents for workers in these projects? Or does it contain every death of the workforce and how much is the workforce? Is it 100k foriegn workers or 1M or more? Doew this include deaths of worker families or just workers?
And in the article they refer to hindustan times article that 100K disappeared. At the same time they say that
> He has invested trillions in his ‘Saudi vision 2030 project
Which does not convey confidence in their handling of numbers given who know thay the aim for the project at most to get 500B investment from government ans external investment (which unlikely to happen).
So back to the question, what does dissappear here means? Are they killed or dead like the Journalist killed by MBS. That seem unlikely and something is missing here.
I know that many people have ideological reasons to down vote and consider every question about numbers a defense towards MBS. Which is a toxic behavior because we shouldn't just take anything the supports our ideology or previous opinions at face value if it is not supported by evidence or if there is questions about that.
Somebody who has lived in that country for a decade and presently in America. I hate to say this but medieval slavery exists in Saudi Arabia.
I would recommend watching "The Goat Life" even though it shows 25% of reality it is still a good start.
This is probably a rerun of the Qatar World Cup 2022 reporting.
We were told that 6500 guest workers had died in workplace accidents building the stadiums, and everyone got very upset.
But that was very misleading. 6500 was the number of deaths for any reason among ~1M guest workers. That is a perfectly normal death rate in a population that size.
The official Qatari statistics was that 37 world cup construction workers died, and only 3 of those were work-related accidents. This info was of course reported far less.
> Earlier, in May, AN reported that plans from Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration were revealed that showed a speculative train line connecting NEOM and a new city built atop Gaza, Palestine.
Sometimes it all just feels like some big formal exercise to mix different terrible aspects into new configurations, to see what might emerge. Just kind of feels like a Frankenstein's monster world.
I'd like a more credible source for the statistics. I would hope the SA demographics community wants to be transparent, I am less sure the SA Gov wants to help here.
An expose by ITV is not how I want to get authentic figures for death rate on a long term engineering project.
This article seems to be conflating laborers dying during 7 years, and laborers dying while working on a few projects. Considering Saudi Arabia’s immigration system, or lack thereof, practically everyone who’s not a citizen is a foreign worker, and South Asians make up the lion share of the 10 million foreign workers. Are we looking at 21k dying out of a 6 million+ population over 7 years, or 21k dying out of a much smaller construction pool for a few projects?
This same narrative was told about the Qatar World Cup, only for the “World Cup deaths” to actually be total cumulative foreign labor deaths. It took the wind out of the movement to get the Gulf countries to reform their treatment of foreign workers.
>Vision 2030 creates a thriving economy where everyone has the opportunity to succeed.
Kek aside, Saudi has limited time/window to pivot away from fossil economy. Sometimes you have to trade bodies for time, and it's much easier to trade bodies of non citizens. Vision 2030 is MBS' 2015 pet project, with 15-20 years to deliver for domestic politics. Even if you think this is vanity project, there's a lot of politics behind it, and dead foreigners for domestic politics is... well fair game. Consolation prize is we might get some cool monuments out of this instead of a war torn country.
Construction sites deaths are gruesome by nature. I feel terrible for those people. Thanks god, we have OSHA (& hopefully, it will not be dismantled as it has been touted)
The stories from that place in past years and their consistency... How workers or nannies are treated like literal slaves, sanctioned or not (or at least out in plain sight and completely unpunished). Nepalis, Philipinos and similar nationalities with 0 possibilities to defend themselves, and often even run away since passports were forcibly taken.
That place has absolutely nothing in common with western morals and mindset, rather being few centuries behind. Think about it next time you buy any product from there (and good luck with oil obviously, so this crap falls on most of us in tiny pieces).
But I guess military bases there trump some pesky human rights, as long as they are not westerners.
It was demonstrated a lot of times that these kind of country put a considerable amount or resources and money to silence disturbing info against them.
Like when they corrupted international committee for football cups and co...
> Borg also said South Asian laborers working on NEOM were “fucking morons” so “that is why white people are at the top of the pecking order.” He also said Gulf women were “tranvestites.”
[+] [-] bhouston|1 year ago|reply
That is way more than the number of Chinese deaths building Canada's railway, which I always thought was a poster child for immigrant abuse: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canadian-p....
Turns out that 30% of the population in Saudi Arabia is foreign workers, so 10M or so, thus 21,000 is roughly one dead per 500 foreign workers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_workers_in_Saudi_Arabi...
This 21,000 deaths, is it including natural deaths or something other than dying as a result of the job?
If it is true, then we need intervention as the death toll is approaching what one would expect in war zone.
[+] [-] wormlord|1 year ago|reply
Enormous numbers of people die very frequently without coverage from mainstream corporate media. Your surprise is mostly from the fact that whatever outlets you would expect to be the watchdogs for this sort of thing, haven't been barking.
There have been guerilla documentaries on slave labor in the gulf for years. I believe the one I saw was Vice. They had people working 12 hour days in the sun with no breaks and sleeping in metal shacks with no A/C in the desert.
I think something like 5,000 civilians have been killed in Myanmar with very little western coverage. Not sure how many have been killed in Sudan in the last year but it is in the tens of thousands. Both of these cases have millions of displaced people as well.
I get that those are wars and this is just slavery, but I'm just trying to make the point that unless you go out of your way to consume media outside the mainstream you'll probably miss a lot of this stuff. It is incredibly shocking when you first hear about it.
[+] [-] Retric|1 year ago|reply
So 3k per year is for 10M workers is twice as deadly for a less dangerous profession, but with worse safety standards, poor treatment, and inherent risks from extreme heat it doesn’t actually sound unrealistic.
[+] [-] diggan|1 year ago|reply
It isn't? Maybe the issue is coming into the light now in the US because Saudi Arabia and US historically been close pals, regardless of the human rights abuses, so maybe there hasn't been a push to "expose" them to the general public in the US until know?
I remember reading about Indonesia being pissed off at Saudi Arabia because many of the Indonesian workers died after going there, and Saudi government didn't seem to really give a crap about the workers. I think I read about this back in 2010 the earliest or something, in Swedish media.
It been known by the western world for a long time already.
[+] [-] bunderbunder|1 year ago|reply
And way lower than the rate of about 1 in 25 indicated by the article you linked on the Canada railway.
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|1 year ago|reply
I had written a longer comment but deleted it and I am posting this instead.
It's about value of life. And no, not all lives are worth the same at all!
You still need hint? Here's something from this article:
> more than 21,000 Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese workers have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017
Adding to that - it's common knowledge here. Such news came out in International magazines/news as well (and keeps coming out) - you must have missed them, or it didn't register.
[+] [-] dathinab|1 year ago|reply
you are forgetting it's a moving target i.e. the dead worker gets replaced with a new worker without the number of foreign workers increasing
but it either is well in the range of expected death tool if you ever looked into the working conditions and other aspects
so it's not really "coming out now", it's more like nearly no one cared when it was bad in the past and got slowly but increasingly worse over the years
[+] [-] pell|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wslh|1 year ago|reply
Could it be that [social] media is too biased? It seems obvious to me that if you look at countries around the world, you’ll be astonished by our “global ignorance". It would be a great exercise if we had new tools to measure things at a macro, worldwide level and not just issue-oriented perspectives.
[+] [-] darth_avocado|1 year ago|reply
There’s a Peter Griffin meme with a color chart explaining that.
[+] [-] AndyMcConachie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blackoil|1 year ago|reply
It isn't China/Iran else 21 deaths would have been news. Media/Citizens also align themselves with the foreign policy.
[+] [-] kragen|1 year ago|reply
So, on that basis, we would conclude that not only is it not "approaching what one would expect in war zone", it's one third of the death rate for young men in one of the world's richest countries, one which has virtually no slavery problem. That is, it's three times safer to be a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia than to be an average young dude in Springfield. So, yes, the death [toll] really can be that high. In fact, it could be many times higher without any job-related deaths at all.
However, your number of "10M or so" is all foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, not just the ones working on Saudi Vision 2030. So, on that basis, it's entirely possible that the number of workers working on Saudi Vision 2030 is much smaller than this 10 million. Maybe we're talking about 3000 deaths per year out of only 1 million workers, or 0.1 million, which would be really alarming!
[+] [-] tzs|1 year ago|reply
The death rate for those foreign workers turned out to less than the death rate for 15-34 year old males in the US. I compared to 15-34 year old males because I figured that foreign workers in Qatar, especially those working on World Cup construction, would tend to be male and younger.
I'm going to take the number of foreign worked in Saudi Arabia as 6 million. That's lower than the number you cited from Wikipedia, but that number is a few year old and has been going down. 6 million seems closer to the current number. I'd rather be low than high because being low on the population size gives a higher death rate. Too high is better than too low when you are trying to check if a death rate is worrisome.
If that 3000 per year turns out to be among all foreign workers and for all causes, like the Qatar numbers, that would give a death rate of 50 per 100k per year.
That would be pretty low. For comparison US death rates for males 15-24 and 25-34 are 127 and 251 respectively, and for females in those age groups they are 49 and 109.
That's low enough to be hard to believe, so a more detailed look into the data is called for. I haven't found any more easily Googled data, so what just follows is speculation.
One possibility is that unlike the Qatar numbers the Saudi numbers actually are only for workers actually working on Saudi Vision 3030 and/or only includes work related deaths. That would lower the denominator and raise the calculated death rate.
Another possibility is that the numbers are like the Qatar numbers and workers there really do die at a lower rate than do young people in the US. Offhand I can think of a couple things that might contribute to this:
1. Many of the jobs for migrants are known to be physically hard. Maybe it is mostly only people who are in very good health who take those jobs.
2. Saudi Arabia greatly restricts alcohol and enforces this with very harsh penalties. Same with drugs. A significant chuck of the US young person deaths are alcohol or drug related and those kind of deaths should be almost entirely absent among the foreign workers in Saudi Arabia.
[+] [-] karel-3d|1 year ago|reply
It seems to me orders of magnitude higher.
edit: hm I guess not
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r...
edit2: more clarity on the Qatar numbers
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-how-many-people-have-died-f...
it's 15.000 foreigners dying in 5 years, counting all foreigner deaths in Qatar. I .... have no idea if that is high or not.
[+] [-] failrate|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yupyupyups|1 year ago|reply
US taxmoney was used to finance the massacre of 40000+ Gazans in the span of 1 year. No interventions happened there.
The people you are pleeding to to do the "intervention" clearly don't care about human lives, so I'm not sure what you are hoping to accomplish.
[+] [-] talldayo|1 year ago|reply
I mean, it's not. There have been estimated death tolls available for years, but people don't ever care. You can safely assume that once this documentary is released, people still won't care.
[+] [-] andy_ppp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|1 year ago|reply
I can already show up at a US embassy or consulate anywhere in the world and provide them my passport serial number to have a new one cut in an hour if I've lost mine, the gap to close is not big policy wise. Otherwise, we're relying on "magic government credential" which can be held hostage to hold a human hostage. Silliness.
(India maintains the largest biometrics ID system in the world, Aadhaar, containing the records of 1.3B people: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2022/0425...)
[+] [-] Tade0|1 year ago|reply
My father worked in Kuwait as an engineer and his passport was locked in a file cabinet at the office, which was unfortunate because he had to fetch it while avoiding gunfire when Saddam Hussein's forces attacked in 1990.
It was worth it though, as the document saved his life when Iraqis mistook him for an American and wanted to execute him on that basis.
[+] [-] maxglute|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jl6|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ukoki|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] game_the0ry|1 year ago|reply
Underneath the veneer of mid-east progress, there are bodies buried underneath skyscrapers.
The most frustrating part -- I am south asian and my family thinks that Dubai is admirable. when I show them docs that say otherwise, they collapse into a state of denial.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelMtGr0DKI
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MJS1ijshHA
[+] [-] actionfromafar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cybrox|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Der_Einzige|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sunaookami|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sixQuarks|1 year ago|reply
https://youtu.be/9OtIAZMqrZE?si=TDdwHNnPwD7hu3CY
[+] [-] password54321|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] moralestapia|1 year ago|reply
You won't believe (you probably will, actually) how quickly Western people there adapt to "the way things are" in those countries. They promptly get a maid for themselves, do the passport thing "just in case", abuse them physically and sexually, etc.
Funny thing is how most of these people would identify as liberal back in their home countries. They casually talk about women rights and abortion and whatnot on their living rooms while their maid is sleeping in a dark basement with no ventilation a few meters from them. It's nauseating.
I lived in Saudi for four years and have experienced this first hand. Contrary to what you'd expect, Saudi nationals are generally more measured with regards to these things. Anglos and Europeans, "first-world" people in general ... they just lose it, it's like a fetishistic thing. It probably is an actual fetish for them as many of them do rape their maids and/or ask for sexual favors from them.
inb4: "Oh, those are bold accusations where is your hard evidence, show me statistics and high-definition videos of all those maids that you claim are being raped daily. I just did a Google search and found nothing, you must be lying. Blah, blah, blah."
[+] [-] elashri|1 year ago|reply
And in the article they refer to hindustan times article that 100K disappeared. At the same time they say that
> He has invested trillions in his ‘Saudi vision 2030 project
Which does not convey confidence in their handling of numbers given who know thay the aim for the project at most to get 500B investment from government ans external investment (which unlikely to happen). So back to the question, what does dissappear here means? Are they killed or dead like the Journalist killed by MBS. That seem unlikely and something is missing here.
I know that many people have ideological reasons to down vote and consider every question about numbers a defense towards MBS. Which is a toxic behavior because we shouldn't just take anything the supports our ideology or previous opinions at face value if it is not supported by evidence or if there is questions about that.
[+] [-] hprotagonist|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] qblv|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|1 year ago|reply
We were told that 6500 guest workers had died in workplace accidents building the stadiums, and everyone got very upset.
But that was very misleading. 6500 was the number of deaths for any reason among ~1M guest workers. That is a perfectly normal death rate in a population that size.
The official Qatari statistics was that 37 world cup construction workers died, and only 3 of those were work-related accidents. This info was of course reported far less.
[+] [-] beepbooptheory|1 year ago|reply
Sometimes it all just feels like some big formal exercise to mix different terrible aspects into new configurations, to see what might emerge. Just kind of feels like a Frankenstein's monster world.
[+] [-] ggm|1 year ago|reply
An expose by ITV is not how I want to get authentic figures for death rate on a long term engineering project.
[+] [-] bitsage|1 year ago|reply
This same narrative was told about the Qatar World Cup, only for the “World Cup deaths” to actually be total cumulative foreign labor deaths. It took the wind out of the movement to get the Gulf countries to reform their treatment of foreign workers.
[+] [-] maxglute|1 year ago|reply
>Vision 2030 creates a thriving economy where everyone has the opportunity to succeed.
Kek aside, Saudi has limited time/window to pivot away from fossil economy. Sometimes you have to trade bodies for time, and it's much easier to trade bodies of non citizens. Vision 2030 is MBS' 2015 pet project, with 15-20 years to deliver for domestic politics. Even if you think this is vanity project, there's a lot of politics behind it, and dead foreigners for domestic politics is... well fair game. Consolation prize is we might get some cool monuments out of this instead of a war torn country.
[+] [-] newprint|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tartoran|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jajko|1 year ago|reply
That place has absolutely nothing in common with western morals and mindset, rather being few centuries behind. Think about it next time you buy any product from there (and good luck with oil obviously, so this crap falls on most of us in tiny pieces).
But I guess military bases there trump some pesky human rights, as long as they are not westerners.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|1 year ago|reply
Fentanyl is used to poison nearly 100k Americans annually, most who don’t even know they are being poisoned by it.
Most Americans don’t know this level of destruction is happening and it’s right here, why would we be expected to notice slave labor deaths far off?
[+] [-] uptownfunk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] moralestapia|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] greatgib|1 year ago|reply
Like when they corrupted international committee for football cups and co...
[+] [-] CapitalTntcls|1 year ago|reply
"Why do you hate billionaires so much?"
[+] [-] stonethrowaway|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]