5 ms·

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

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? 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-pacific-railway#:~:text=Upward%20of%2015%2C000%20Chinese%20labourers,died%20working%20on%20the%20railway 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_Arabia 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.

umeshunni 2y ago
The actual report says that 21000 foreign workers have died in Saudi Arabia (of all causes) since 2017, in a population of 5M+ so youe first guess is probably right.
talldayo 2y ago
> How can that only be coming out now? 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.
- bhouston 2y ago
  > There have been estimated death tolls available for years, but people don't ever care. Can you share?
  - talldayo 2y ago
    https://alqst.org/ar/posts/808 https://alqst.org/ar/posts/808 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/05/saudi-arabia-un-experts-alarmed-imminent-executions-linked-neom-project https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/05/saudi-arabia...
wslh 2y ago
> How can that only be coming out now? 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.
- falcor84 2y ago
  It really would - is there any watchdog organization that is tackling this sort of thing and generates anything resembling a standardized data set?
failrate 2y ago
If we know of 21,000 deaths it is safe to assume there are more deaths we do not know about.
kiba 2y ago
That is less than the number of automotive fatalities in the US in a given year since the 1920s.[1] I don't know why you consider this an incredibly high number. Active war zone such as the Ukrainian battlefields kill way more people. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
- simonw 2y ago
  The population of the USA is 335 million. Saudi Arabia is 37 million. Comparing those numbers without considering population doesn't tell us anything.
wormlord 2y ago
> 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.
- freeqaz 2y ago
  Where do you go for this information though? I think that's the tool that many people struggle to understand here. If you have the desire to learn more, how do you get there?
  - MisterTea 2y ago
    You have to journey outside of your local national news networks. Foreign news networks often have English editions or counterparts and there are numerous translation services on line.
  - wormlord 2y ago
    I like many of the journalists from The Intercept[0]. You can find publications that are outside the mainstream and then follow journalists independently on substack. Many of them collaborate with each other, it is kinda like the MCU of journalism. [0] https://theintercept.com/ https://theintercept.com/
  - 2y ago
Juden1488 2y ago
[dead]
AndyMcConachie 2y ago
Having been to Doha and seen how they treat workers there I am not that surprised by the 21,000 number.
dathinab 2y ago
> is roughly one dead per 500 foreign worker 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
gnatman 2y ago
An estimated 28,000 workers died in the construction of the Panama canal. Even in the "safer" US-managed phase the death rate was 1 out of every 10 workers. Obviously there's an apple/orange effect to consider here. Nevertheless.
- Tepix 2y ago
  That was such a long time ago, it would not be acceptable today. Also were two external factors in particular: Malaria and yellow fever. This is not the case at NEOM. It's just bad treatment of these workers.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    > That was such a long time ago, it would not be acceptable today. Not in the US, but this is a place that does public beheadings. > Also were two external factors in particular: Malaria and yellow fever. Here the external factor is desert heat.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      It's a bit easier to mitigate heat related issues which can cause fatalities in 2024 than trying to control people getting bitten by mosquitos or drinking contaminated water in 1910. Not saying it'll definitely get to 0, accidents do happen, but it could be a lot lower. The only question is if there's a will do actually try and mitigate it.
  - umeshunni 2y ago
    Sure but don't forget that most Muslim countries are living in the 14th century culturally. We're talking about a country that only gave women the right to drive cars in 2015.
diggan 2y ago
> How can that only be coming out now? 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.
- bbor 2y ago
  Yeah XKCD reminds us that something that "everyone knows" is taught to 10,000/day and we should have empathy, but I definitely think this is one of those situations. If you're curious how this could happen, there's a simple explanation, IMO: these countries are some of the small handful of non-republics left in the entire world. There's lots of authoritarian republics, but true totalitarian systems are another beast entirely, just from a cultural perspective alone. Here's a semi-outdated map that I'd argue Afghanistan has earned a place on, and also doesn't shout out The Holy See, which is also a theocratic monarchy: https://i0.wp.com/mattdallisson.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Mapped-The-Worlds-Legal-Government-Systems.jpg?fit=1198%2C696&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/mattdallisson.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/... The list is basically Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Holy See, and uhhhh that's kinda it. The UAE is a republic of monarchies, which is a fun/sad corner case. When the laws are made at the whim of the sovereign, chattel slavery isn't so unimaginable.
  - StefanBatory 2y ago
    I'm not sure how correct that map is - i.e I always heard Poland being described as having semi-presidential republic system.
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    I object to my country, New Zealand, having the same colour as the UK. Yes, we have that moronic family in the background somewhere, but we don’t have an unelected House of Lords. How that archaic system remains is baffling. Buy a seat and away you go!
karel-3d 2y ago
How is this death rate compared to Qatar and Dubai death rate? It seems to me orders of magnitude higher. edit: hm I guess not https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/revealed-migrant-worker-deaths-qatar-fifa-world-cup-2022 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-for-the-qatar-world-cup/a-63763713 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.
- bhouston 2y ago
  "More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago, the Guardian can reveal." Damn, the gulf state's abuse of foreign workers is right up there with US and Canada's treatment of foreign workers 100 years ago.
  - banannaise 2y ago
    Considering that the US and others largely know about this and benefit from the product of this labor, one might argue that they never stopped; they simply outsourced it.
    - lostlogin 2y ago
      Depending on how it goes today, a fair bit of labour may get shipped out the US shortly.
Retric 2y ago
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 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mmmore 2y ago
  Not to justify Saudi Arabian conditions, but if you're more granular than I assume that release is, there are a few professions in the US that have higher yearly fatality rates than 3k/10M = 30/100k including roofers, fishing/hunting, and aircraft pilots. "Helpers in construction trades" have a fatality rate of nearly 40/100k.[1] Now I don't think 10M is the correct denominator. It's unlikely all those workers are in construction where a lot of the deaths are presumably concentrated. According to this[2], there were around 4.4M foreign construction workers in 2016. 3k/5M (assuming numbers have increased) is 60/100k, so around as dangerous as the most dangerous professions in the US. But this also doesn't account for the alleged missing. [1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-injuries/civilian-occupations-with-high-fatal-work-injury-rates.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju... [2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/140/1/012097/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/140/1/0...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- yread 2y ago
  There are a lot deadlier jobs than transportation worker: https://www.invictuslawpc.com/most-dangerous-jobs-osha/ https://www.invictuslawpc.com/most-dangerous-jobs-osha/ > Fishing and Hunting Workers > Fatal injury rate: 132.1 per 100,000 workers. Luckily, not that many people work as hunters/fisherman
darth_avocado 2y ago
> How can that only be coming out now? There’s a Peter Griffin meme with a color chart explaining that.
bunderbunder 2y ago
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.
- rrix2 2y ago
  Its too bad we didnt learn anything about occupational safety in the last 150 years!
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > 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. It would be very surprising if it were anything close to half of foreign workers; it's just one (very big) project.
tim333 2y ago
It seems surprisingly high. I was googling trying to find a source beyond 'TV program said' but have failed so far.
pell 2y ago
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-killings-migrants-yemen-border https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/21/saudi-arabia-mass-killin...
crossroadsguy 2y ago
> How can that only be coming out now? 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.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Yeah, people have been talking about this for years, if not decades. For example, 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Treatment_of_South_Asian_labourers_in_the_Gulf_Cooperation_Council_region&oldid=996883747 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Treatment_of_Sout... Referencing a 2013 article: https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/12/18/south-asia-protect-migrant-workers-gulf-countries# https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/12/18/south-asia-protect-migra...
blackoil 2y ago
> How can that only be coming out now? It isn't China/Iran else 21 deaths would have been news. Media/Citizens also align themselves with the foreign policy.
kragen 2y ago
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 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!
yupyupyups 2y ago
>the death toll is approaching what one would expect in war zone. 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.
tzs 2y ago
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.
- soco 2y ago
  How about gun-related deaths? I would assume they are also way less in the Saudi Arabia.
exe34 2y ago
> If it is true, then we need intervention as the death toll is approaching what one would expect in war zone. In the West, it's only relevant if it is claimed that Jews were involved, whether or not the number is realistic.

umeshunni 2y ago

The actual report says that 21000 foreign workers have died in Saudi Arabia (of all causes) since 2017, in a population of 5M+ so youe first guess is probably right.

talldayo 2y ago

> How can that only be coming out now? 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.

bhouston 2y ago
> There have been estimated death tolls available for years, but people don't ever care. Can you share?
- talldayo 2y ago
  https://alqst.org/ar/posts/808 https://alqst.org/ar/posts/808 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/05/saudi-arabia-un-experts-alarmed-imminent-executions-linked-neom-project https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/05/saudi-arabia...

wslh 2y ago

> How can that only be coming out now? 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.

falcor84 2y ago
It really would - is there any watchdog organization that is tackling this sort of thing and generates anything resembling a standardized data set?

failrate 2y ago

If we know of 21,000 deaths it is safe to assume there are more deaths we do not know about.

kiba 2y ago

That is less than the number of automotive fatalities in the US in a given year since the 1920s.[1] I don't know why you consider this an incredibly high number. Active war zone such as the Ukrainian battlefields kill way more people. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

simonw 2y ago
The population of the USA is 335 million. Saudi Arabia is 37 million. Comparing those numbers without considering population doesn't tell us anything.

wormlord 2y ago

> 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.

freeqaz 2y ago
Where do you go for this information though? I think that's the tool that many people struggle to understand here. If you have the desire to learn more, how do you get there?
- MisterTea 2y ago
  You have to journey outside of your local national news networks. Foreign news networks often have English editions or counterparts and there are numerous translation services on line.
- wormlord 2y ago
  I like many of the journalists from The Intercept[0]. You can find publications that are outside the mainstream and then follow journalists independently on substack. Many of them collaborate with each other, it is kinda like the MCU of journalism. [0] https://theintercept.com/ https://theintercept.com/
- 2y ago

Juden1488 2y ago

[dead]

AndyMcConachie 2y ago

Having been to Doha and seen how they treat workers there I am not that surprised by the 21,000 number.

dathinab 2y ago

> is roughly one dead per 500 foreign worker 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

gnatman 2y ago

An estimated 28,000 workers died in the construction of the Panama canal. Even in the "safer" US-managed phase the death rate was 1 out of every 10 workers. Obviously there's an apple/orange effect to consider here. Nevertheless.

Tepix 2y ago
That was such a long time ago, it would not be acceptable today. Also were two external factors in particular: Malaria and yellow fever. This is not the case at NEOM. It's just bad treatment of these workers.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > That was such a long time ago, it would not be acceptable today. Not in the US, but this is a place that does public beheadings. > Also were two external factors in particular: Malaria and yellow fever. Here the external factor is desert heat.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    It's a bit easier to mitigate heat related issues which can cause fatalities in 2024 than trying to control people getting bitten by mosquitos or drinking contaminated water in 1910. Not saying it'll definitely get to 0, accidents do happen, but it could be a lot lower. The only question is if there's a will do actually try and mitigate it.
- umeshunni 2y ago
  Sure but don't forget that most Muslim countries are living in the 14th century culturally. We're talking about a country that only gave women the right to drive cars in 2015.

diggan 2y ago

> How can that only be coming out now? 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.

bbor 2y ago
Yeah XKCD reminds us that something that "everyone knows" is taught to 10,000/day and we should have empathy, but I definitely think this is one of those situations. If you're curious how this could happen, there's a simple explanation, IMO: these countries are some of the small handful of non-republics left in the entire world. There's lots of authoritarian republics, but true totalitarian systems are another beast entirely, just from a cultural perspective alone. Here's a semi-outdated map that I'd argue Afghanistan has earned a place on, and also doesn't shout out The Holy See, which is also a theocratic monarchy: https://i0.wp.com/mattdallisson.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Mapped-The-Worlds-Legal-Government-Systems.jpg?fit=1198%2C696&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/mattdallisson.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/... The list is basically Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Holy See, and uhhhh that's kinda it. The UAE is a republic of monarchies, which is a fun/sad corner case. When the laws are made at the whim of the sovereign, chattel slavery isn't so unimaginable.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  I'm not sure how correct that map is - i.e I always heard Poland being described as having semi-presidential republic system.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  I object to my country, New Zealand, having the same colour as the UK. Yes, we have that moronic family in the background somewhere, but we don’t have an unelected House of Lords. How that archaic system remains is baffling. Buy a seat and away you go!

karel-3d 2y ago

How is this death rate compared to Qatar and Dubai death rate? It seems to me orders of magnitude higher. edit: hm I guess not https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/revealed-migrant-worker-deaths-qatar-fifa-world-cup-2022 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-for-the-qatar-world-cup/a-63763713 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.

bhouston 2y ago
"More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago, the Guardian can reveal." Damn, the gulf state's abuse of foreign workers is right up there with US and Canada's treatment of foreign workers 100 years ago.
- banannaise 2y ago
  Considering that the US and others largely know about this and benefit from the product of this labor, one might argue that they never stopped; they simply outsourced it.
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    Depending on how it goes today, a fair bit of labour may get shipped out the US shortly.

Retric 2y ago

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 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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mmmore 2y ago
Not to justify Saudi Arabian conditions, but if you're more granular than I assume that release is, there are a few professions in the US that have higher yearly fatality rates than 3k/10M = 30/100k including roofers, fishing/hunting, and aircraft pilots. "Helpers in construction trades" have a fatality rate of nearly 40/100k.[1] Now I don't think 10M is the correct denominator. It's unlikely all those workers are in construction where a lot of the deaths are presumably concentrated. According to this[2], there were around 4.4M foreign construction workers in 2016. 3k/5M (assuming numbers have increased) is 60/100k, so around as dangerous as the most dangerous professions in the US. But this also doesn't account for the alleged missing. [1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-injuries/civilian-occupations-with-high-fatal-work-injury-rates.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju... [2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/140/1/012097/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/140/1/0...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
yread 2y ago
There are a lot deadlier jobs than transportation worker: https://www.invictuslawpc.com/most-dangerous-jobs-osha/ https://www.invictuslawpc.com/most-dangerous-jobs-osha/ > Fishing and Hunting Workers > Fatal injury rate: 132.1 per 100,000 workers. Luckily, not that many people work as hunters/fisherman

darth_avocado 2y ago

> How can that only be coming out now? There’s a Peter Griffin meme with a color chart explaining that.

bunderbunder 2y ago

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.

rrix2 2y ago
Its too bad we didnt learn anything about occupational safety in the last 150 years!
rsynnott 2y ago
> 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. It would be very surprising if it were anything close to half of foreign workers; it's just one (very big) project.

tim333 2y ago

It seems surprisingly high. I was googling trying to find a source beyond 'TV program said' but have failed so far.

pell 2y ago

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-killings-migrants-yemen-border https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/21/saudi-arabia-mass-killin...

crossroadsguy 2y ago

> How can that only be coming out now? 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.

ceejayoz 2y ago
Yeah, people have been talking about this for years, if not decades. For example, 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Treatment_of_South_Asian_labourers_in_the_Gulf_Cooperation_Council_region&oldid=996883747 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Treatment_of_Sout... Referencing a 2013 article: https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/12/18/south-asia-protect-migrant-workers-gulf-countries# https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/12/18/south-asia-protect-migra...

blackoil 2y ago

> How can that only be coming out now? It isn't China/Iran else 21 deaths would have been news. Media/Citizens also align themselves with the foreign policy.

kragen 2y ago

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 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!

yupyupyups 2y ago

>the death toll is approaching what one would expect in war zone. 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.

tzs 2y ago

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.

soco 2y ago
How about gun-related deaths? I would assume they are also way less in the Saudi Arabia.

exe34 2y ago

> If it is true, then we need intervention as the death toll is approaching what one would expect in war zone. In the West, it's only relevant if it is claimed that Jews were involved, whether or not the number is realistic.