There is a number that should appear on the front page of every institutional investor report about Saudi Arabia, every architectural firm’s pitch deck for a giga-project commission, every FIFA press release about the 2034 World Cup.
Twenty-one thousand.
That is the estimated number of migrant workers from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal who have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017, working on projects linked to Vision 2030, according to an ITV documentary investigation aired in October 2024. That is roughly eight deaths per day, every day, for eight years. Nepal’s Foreign Employment Board has reported that the deaths of more than 650 Nepalese workers remain unexplained. Over 100,000 migrant workers have been reported as missing.
Saudi authorities dispute these figures. The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health stated that the Kingdom’s work-related fatality rate stands at 1.12 per 100,000 workers, placing it among the lowest globally. But this statistic — if accurate — covers all employment sectors, not the construction megaprojects where conditions are most extreme. And it does not account for the workers who die of heat exhaustion, cardiac arrest, or “natural causes” after sixteen-hour shifts in fifty-degree heat, deaths that are never classified as work-related because the body gives out in the dormitory rather than on the scaffolding.
Human Rights Watch published a seventy-nine-page report in December 2024 whose title tells you everything: “Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later.” The report documented exorbitant recruitment fees that trap workers in debt before they arrive, rampant wage theft — some workers waited ten months for unpaid wages — inadequate heat protections, restrictions on changing employers, and uninvestigated deaths. The organisation concluded that some of these conditions may amount to situations of forced labour.
This is not a footnote in the Vision 2030 story. This is the foundation it is built on.
The Architecture of Silence
The global architecture and engineering industry knows. Every major practice working on Saudi giga-projects has access to the reporting. Foster + Partners, which designed the King Salman International Airport terminal and at least one Red Sea resort, declined to comment when asked about the ITV investigation. Zaha Hadid Architects, working on a 330-metre tower for the Trojena ski resort, did not respond. Heatherwick Studio did not respond. Populous, which is designing approximately a quarter of the stadiums for the 2034 FIFA World Cup, declined to comment.
Amnesty International’s head of labour rights stated that the enormity of the Vision 2030 projects means they will “inevitably rely on a huge workforce of migrant workers who face significant risks of exploitation and even death.” The statement did not provoke a single architecture firm to withdraw from a single project.
Duncan Baker-Brown, a RIBA councillor and runner-up in the RIBA presidential election, posed the question directly on LinkedIn: to all the members working on these projects, could they explain what it would take for them to resign, or tell him why the allegations are untrue. The silence was deafening. Nobody resigned. Nobody explained.
The financial industry is no different. PIF — the sovereign wealth fund that finances many of the giga-projects — has issued bonds underwritten by the world’s largest banks. Those bonds are purchased by pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and institutional investors across Europe and North America. The due diligence process for these transactions does not typically include a line item for migrant worker mortality rates.
This is not ignorance. It is a collective decision — made by architects, engineers, bankers, consultants, and governments — that the economic opportunity in Saudi Arabia outweighs the human cost. It is a moral calculation made in boardrooms and never spoken aloud.
The Kafala System’s Shadow
Saudi Arabia has introduced labour reforms. The Kingdom was the first country in the Gulf Cooperation Council to sign the International Labour Organisation’s 2014 Protocol to the Forced Labour Convention. In January 2025, it became the first Arab country to launch a National Policy on Forced Labour and Worker Rights. Online platforms like Qiwa and Absher have digitised administrative procedures for employment transfers and exit permits.
On paper, these reforms represent progress. In practice, they have not resolved the fundamental power asymmetry that defines migrant labour in Saudi Arabia.
Human Rights Watch interviews revealed that online portals have not eliminated employer control. Workers still require employer approval to transfer jobs. One worker told the organisation: regardless of whether the process is online or offline, the employer has to approve, and they claim big reforms, but on the ground, the employer has the final say. The kafala system — the sponsorship structure that ties a worker’s legal status to their employer — has been reformed but not abolished. Workers who flee abusive employers risk deportation. Workers who report wage theft risk losing their residency status. Workers who die are buried, repatriated, or simply disappear from the records.
Saudi Arabia hosts 13.4 million migrant workers. Bangladeshis, Indians, and Pakistanis form the three largest foreign nationalities. Over 498,000 Bangladeshis and 426,951 Pakistanis travelled to Saudi Arabia for employment in 2023 alone. These numbers are expected to surge as the 2034 World Cup construction ramps up, requiring eleven new stadiums, over 185,000 hotel rooms, and massive transportation infrastructure.
The Human Rights Watch report framed this explicitly: the systematic failure to protect migrant workers creates a near certainty that the 2034 World Cup will be stained with pervasive rights violations.
The Western Complicity Question
Here is where the story becomes uncomfortable for audiences that prefer to view Saudi labour abuses as someone else’s problem.
The giga-projects that employ migrant workers under these conditions are designed by British, American, Japanese, and European firms. They are financed by bonds purchased by Western pension funds. They are promoted at conferences attended by Western executives. They are covered by Western media outlets that send correspondents to the Future Investment Initiative and file glowing reports about the Kingdom’s transformation.
The 2034 World Cup was awarded by FIFA, a Swiss-headquartered organisation, to Saudi Arabia as the sole bidder — a process that was, in the assessment of every serious sports governance analyst, engineered to produce exactly that outcome. FIFA’s own bidding documents acknowledge the scale of construction required. FIFA’s own human rights framework requires host countries to demonstrate adequate labour protections. Saudi Arabia’s bid was accepted despite the ITV documentary, despite the Human Rights Watch report, despite every piece of evidence that the labour conditions on existing giga-projects are dangerous and, in some cases, lethal.
The consultancy industry — McKinsey, BCG, Oliver Wyman, PwC, Deloitte — has generated billions in revenue advising the Saudi government and PIF on Vision 2030 strategy. These firms employ rigorous ethical review processes for their client engagements. None of them have publicly disclosed the results of any labour rights due diligence conducted in connection with their Saudi work.
This is not a Saudi problem. This is a global capitalism problem. The deaths happen in Saudi Arabia, but the money that finances them circulates through London, New York, Zurich, and Tokyo. The architects who design the buildings work from offices in Clerkenwell and Shoreditch. The bankers who structure the bonds sit in Canary Wharf and Midtown Manhattan. The consultants who optimise the project timelines fly business class from Heathrow to King Khalid International.
Everyone in this ecosystem knows. The information is publicly available. The ITV documentary was broadcast on prime-time British television. The Human Rights Watch report is freely accessible online. The architecture press has covered the worker deaths extensively.
The calculation is simple: the fees are too large to refuse, the reputational risk of association is manageable, and the dead workers are from countries that lack the geopolitical leverage to impose consequences.
The Qatar Comparison — And Why It Is Worse
When Qatar hosted the 2022 World Cup, the estimated migrant worker death toll during the construction period — variously reported between 6,500 and 15,000 depending on methodology and timeframe — generated global outrage. Boycott movements formed. Major sponsors faced pressure. The Guardian’s investigation became one of the most widely cited pieces of sports journalism in history. FIFA was forced to create a legacy fund for workers’ families, though the amount was widely criticised as inadequate.
Saudi Arabia’s reported death toll of 21,000 exceeds even the highest Qatar estimates. The construction programme is larger — Vision 2030 encompasses dozens of megaprojects across the entire country, not a single tournament in a single city. The workforce is larger: 140,000 migrant workers at NEOM alone, according to the ITV documentary. And the timeline extends to 2034 and beyond, meaning the death toll will continue to accumulate.
Yet the global response has been remarkably muted compared to Qatar. There has been no sustained boycott campaign. No major sponsor has publicly distanced itself from the 2034 World Cup. No government has imposed sanctions or conditioned diplomatic engagement on labour reforms. The explanation is uncomfortable but straightforward: Saudi Arabia is a larger economy, a larger oil producer, a larger arms buyer, and a larger sovereign wealth fund investor than Qatar. Its geopolitical leverage is proportionally greater, and the cost of confrontation proportionally higher.
The Heat Death Problem
There is a specific dimension of the worker death crisis that deserves focused attention because it reveals how the system disguises its own costs.
Saudi Arabia’s summer temperatures regularly exceed 50 degrees Celsius in construction zones. The Kingdom has workplace heat regulations — outdoor labour is prohibited during peak afternoon hours in the hottest months. But these regulations are widely reported as inadequately enforced, and they do not address the cumulative physiological toll of sustained heat exposure over months of physically demanding work.
When a construction worker collapses from heat stroke on a construction site, the death may be classified as work-related. When the same worker collapses from cardiac arrest in his dormitory eight hours later — his body having absorbed lethal quantities of heat over a sixteen-hour shift — the death is classified as “natural causes.” This classification mechanism systematically undercounts heat-related fatalities by separating the cause (extreme labour in extreme heat) from the effect (organ failure hours later).
Nepal’s Foreign Employment Board has specifically flagged this issue, noting that the deaths of more than 650 Nepalese workers in Saudi Arabia remain unexplained — meaning no cause of death was determined or communicated to the families. These are not workers who fell from scaffolding. These are workers who simply did not wake up.
The Saudi government’s claim that its fatality rate of 1.12 per 100,000 workers is globally competitive must be evaluated against this classification framework. If deaths that occur off-site but result from on-site conditions are excluded from the count, the statistic measures what is convenient rather than what is true.
What Reform Would Actually Look Like
The path to meaningful reform is not complicated. It is politically inconvenient.
First, the kafala system must be abolished, not reformed. Workers must have the legal right to change employers without employer consent, to leave the country without employer permission, and to access legal remedies for wage theft and abuse without risking their immigration status. Saudi Arabia has taken partial steps in this direction. They are insufficient.
Second, independent monitoring must be established. The current system relies on Saudi government agencies to investigate complaints about conditions on projects funded by the Saudi government. This is a structural conflict of interest. An independent, internationally supervised monitoring body — with access to construction sites, worker dormitories, and employment records — is the minimum credible accountability mechanism.
Third, the international firms that profit from Vision 2030 must be held to their own stated standards. Every major architecture firm, engineering consultancy, and financial institution involved in Saudi giga-projects has published commitments to human rights, responsible business conduct, and ethical practice. These commitments are currently decorative. They must become contractual — tied to audit requirements, public reporting, and financial consequences for violations in their supply chains.
Fourth, FIFA must condition the 2034 World Cup on verifiable labour reforms. The organisation has the leverage. Saudi Arabia’s investment in the tournament — reputational, financial, and political — is enormous. FIFA can demand independent monitoring, binding labour standards, and public reporting as conditions of hosting. Whether it will do so is another question entirely.
The Moral Ledger
Vision 2030 will be judged by history on multiple dimensions: economic diversification, social transformation, institutional development, geopolitical positioning. These are the metrics that analysts track, investors price, and governments celebrate.
But there is another ledger. It records the Nepali construction worker who fell from scaffolding at a NEOM site after a sixteen-hour shift. The Bangladeshi labourer who collapsed from heat exhaustion in his dormitory and was classified as a “natural cause” death. The Indian electrician who has not been paid in ten months and cannot leave because his employer holds his passport, despite the law that says he can.
This ledger does not appear in PIF’s annual report. It does not feature in the Global AI Summit’s agenda. It is not included in the architectural renders that show gleaming towers rising from the desert.
But it exists. And until the global ecosystem that finances, designs, constructs, and celebrates Vision 2030 confronts it honestly — not with press releases about digital reform platforms, but with enforceable protections for the human beings whose labour makes the entire programme physically possible — the transformation will carry a price that no amount of sovereign wealth can repay.
Twenty-one thousand.
That is not a statistic. That is a cemetery the size of a small city, filled with people who came to Saudi Arabia because they were told there was work, and who never went home.
This analysis draws on reporting from ITV’s “Kingdom Uncovered,” Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, Walk Free, the Architects’ Journal, Newsweek, and Parametric Architecture. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with the Government of Saudi Arabia, PIF, NEOM, or any official Vision 2030 entity.