Every abuse documented at NEOM — the wage theft, the death classification fraud, the passport confiscation, the inability to flee heat exposure, the impossibility of reporting gang rape to authorities, the trapped workers who describe themselves as slaves — flows from a single structural source. The kafala system is not one of the problems with Saudi Arabia’s labour model. It is the system that makes all the other problems possible.
The kafala is not a single law. It is an architecture of dependency — a set of interlocking legal provisions, administrative practices, and economic arrangements that bind a migrant worker to a specific employer for the duration of their time in Saudi Arabia. The worker cannot enter the country without a sponsor. Cannot work for a different employer without the current employer’s written consent. Cannot leave the country without an exit permit that the employer must approve. Cannot access the legal system without the employer’s cooperation. Cannot change these conditions without resources, knowledge, and mobility that the system itself denies.
Thirteen point four million migrant workers operate within this system in Saudi Arabia — 42 per cent of the country’s total population. Over 6.3 million migrants comprise more than 80 per cent of the private sector workforce. They constitute the labour that built Vision 2030’s airports, roads, stadiums, hydrogen plants, and 2.4 kilometres of The Line. They are not employees in the sense that the word is understood in any jurisdiction with functional labour law. They are assets — bound to their sponsors not by contract but by the sponsor’s control over their legal existence in the country.
Understanding the kafala is the prerequisite for understanding everything else about the labour conditions at NEOM and across Vision 2030. Without it, each documented abuse appears isolated — a bad employer, a negligent contractor, a single systemic failure. With it, the abuses are revealed as the predictable, structural, and intended consequences of a system that functions precisely as designed.
How It Works
A migrant worker seeking employment in Saudi Arabia must be sponsored by a Saudi employer. The sponsor — the kafeel — assumes formal responsibility for the worker’s legal status in the Kingdom. In practice, this responsibility translates into control. The sponsor determines whether the worker can enter the country, where the worker can work, and whether the worker can leave.
The worker’s residency permit — the iqama — is tied to the sponsor. If the worker leaves the sponsor without permission, the iqama becomes invalid. The worker becomes undocumented. An undocumented worker in Saudi Arabia cannot seek legal employment, cannot access healthcare, cannot leave the country through normal channels, and is subject to arrest and deportation. The choice is binary: remain with the sponsor under whatever conditions the sponsor imposes, or become a fugitive in a desert kingdom with no legal status and no way home.
The exit permit system, formally reformed but functionally intact, requires the worker to obtain the employer’s approval before leaving Saudi Arabia. Since the 2021 Labour Reform Initiative, only 618 workers have obtained final exit permits without employer consent — out of 13.4 million migrant workers in the country. In the same period, 4,389,950 sponsor transfer requests were submitted through the Qiwa platform — but the completion rate has not been disclosed by the Saudi government. The US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons report recorded 305,444 foreign workers who changed employers without consent — a number that sounds significant until measured against the 13.4 million who could not, would not, or did not know how. A system in which 2.3 per cent of workers have successfully changed employers is not a reformed system. It is an unreformed system with a statistical margin.
The inability to change employers without the current employer’s written consent creates the economic trap. A worker who is underpaid, abused, or endangered cannot transfer to a better employer. The worker can request a transfer through the Qiwa platform — Saudi Arabia’s digital labour market system. The platform requires the current employer to approve the transfer. Employers who have invested in the worker’s recruitment — who have paid agency fees, arranged visas, and provided housing — have no financial incentive to release the worker to a competitor. The digital system replicates the analogue power dynamic with a user interface.
Workers who attempt to circumvent the transfer restriction face illegal fees. Human Rights Watch documented cases in which workers were charged 12,000 riyals ($3,200) or 8,500 riyals ($2,266) by employers as the price of releasing them to another sponsor. The fees are illegal under Saudi labour law. The law’s prohibition has not prevented the practice because the enforcement mechanism — a worker filing a complaint against an employer who controls the worker’s legal status — requires the very freedom that the kafala denies.
The Debt
The kafala system does not begin in Saudi Arabia. It begins in the worker’s home country, where the cost of reaching the job creates the financial bondage that the kafala then locks in place.
Of 130 migrant workers surveyed by Human Rights Watch, 128 reported paying illegal recruitment fees to reach Saudi Arabia. Only two paid nothing. The average fee paid by Bangladeshi workers was $3,715 — nearly 20 times the monthly wage of $188 that many received upon arrival. Workers on NEOM projects reported paying $1,115 to $1,260. Workers on Red Sea Global projects reported $873 to $1,100. The fees are multiples of the worker’s annual earnings, borrowed at interest rates that range from routine to usurious: one worker borrowed at 42 per cent annual interest, others from moneylenders, family savings, or secured against agricultural land.
The fees fund the recruitment agencies that operate the pipeline between South Asian villages and Saudi construction sites. The agencies provide the documentation, the visa sponsorship, the transport, and — in many cases — the fraudulent job descriptions that lure workers into contracts they would not have accepted if accurately described. Forty-seven of the workers HRW interviewed were given jobs different from what they had been promised upon arrival. They signed contracts in Arabic — a language they did not speak — and discovered the terms only when they began working.
The debt the worker carries from home is the first link in the chain. He borrowed $3,715 to reach a job that pays $213 per month ($800 riyals, the reduced wage documented by HRW). If he is paid in full and on time — which the evidence suggests is the exception rather than the rule — it takes 17.5 months of gross earnings to repay the recruitment fee alone, before rent, food, and remittances. If he is underpaid — receiving $213 instead of the promised $320 — the repayment period extends further. If he is not paid at all — as 71 of HRW’s 112 interviewees experienced — the debt compounds while the worker labours without income, unable to leave, unable to complain, and unable to stop working because the alternative to underpaid work is unpaid deportation with the debt intact.
The debt operates as a secondary binding mechanism, independent of the kafala’s legal provisions. Even if the worker could legally leave his employer, the debt prevents him from leaving the country — because returning home means returning to creditors with nothing to show for the borrowing. The worker is trapped by law (the kafala) and by economics (the debt). The two systems are independent in their mechanisms and convergent in their effects. Together, they produce a workforce that cannot leave, cannot complain, and cannot stop working under any conditions the employer imposes.
The NEOM Context
NEOM’s construction workforce — approximately 140,000 at its peak — was housed in isolated camps in the Tabuk desert. The camps are vast settlements of identical housing blocks, surrounded by fences, accessed through guard houses, and located hundreds of miles from the nearest town. The isolation compounds every element of the kafala’s control.
A worker in Riyadh or Jeddah — while still subject to the kafala — can, in theory, access his embassy, reach a labour court, or contact a human rights organisation. A worker in the NEOM zone cannot. The embassies are in Riyadh, approximately 1,200 kilometres away. The labour courts are in urban centres. The human rights organisations that document abuse — ALQST, Human Rights Watch, FairSquare — are based in London and New York. The worker’s phone may be his only connection to the outside world, and HRW documented cases in which workers had their phones confiscated or smashed for attempting to call for help.
The testimony from workers at NEOM, documented in the HRW report and the ITV documentary, describes the compound effect: “We are in the middle of nowhere. Embassies are very far away. If something goes wrong, there is nowhere we can go. There is also fear. Where do we go? Who do we tell?”
The isolation is not incidental to NEOM’s construction model. It is the construction model. A megaproject in a remote desert location requires a captive workforce — workers who live at the site, who cannot commute from an independent residence, and who are dependent on the employer for every element of daily life: housing, food, water, transport, communication, and the physical security of the camp itself. The kafala provides the legal framework for this dependency. The geography provides the physical framework. Together, they create what the workers describe as a trap.
Passport confiscation — illegal under Saudi law but documented by human rights organisations as widespread — completes the control structure. Without a passport, the worker cannot prove his identity to any authority, cannot travel within the Kingdom, and cannot leave the country even if the exit permit restriction were removed. One worker documented by HRW reported that his company demanded four months’ salary for the return of his passport — charging the worker for the return of his own identity document.
The Reforms
Saudi Arabia has announced multiple rounds of kafala reform. The March 2021 Labour Reform Initiative allowed workers to leave jobs without employer consent upon contract expiry, or after one year with 90 days’ notice. Exit permits were modified — employers are now notified and have ten days to lodge an inquiry rather than granting explicit permission. All contracts must be digitised through the Qiwa platform, which serves over 14.5 million registered users in six languages.
The most dramatic announcement came in June 2025, when Saudi Arabia declared the formal abolition of the kafala system entirely — reported internationally as a landmark change. Workers could now change jobs without employer consent and leave the country without exit visas from sponsors.
The abolition is a legal fact. It is not an operational fact. The Building and Wood Workers’ International survey of 193 migrant workers — conducted after the announced reforms — found that 85 per cent experienced debt bondage, 65 per cent experienced passport or document withholding, 63 per cent experienced restrictions on terminating or leaving their contracts, and 46 per cent experienced wage theft. The numbers describe a system that has been renamed, not reformed.
The 2020 and 2021 reform packages introduced the Qiwa platform for job transfers, removed the requirement for employer consent on exit visas in certain categories, and expanded the definition of workplace mobility. Each reform addressed a specific mechanism while leaving the broader architecture intact. The Qiwa platform allows job transfers — but requires the current employer’s cooperation for the transfer to proceed. The exit visa reform removed the requirement — but only for certain visa categories and with implementation gaps that leave the majority of construction workers covered by the old rules.
SMASCO — Saudi Manpower Solutions Company, a PIF-linked entity and the first company licensed for workforce solutions by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development, now listed on the Tadawul since July 2024 — illustrates how the reformed system operates in practice. HRW documented SMASCO’s “warehousing” technique: hiring more workers than needed, then leaving them idle for months without pay. Workers reported: “There is no regular work. Many in the company are sitting for three to four months without leave or salaries.” Salaries were delayed even when client companies paid SMASCO on time. Workers recruited under false pretences were told they would work for a specific client company but found themselves sponsored by SMASCO. Three Kenyan women reported from inside a SMASCO facility that they could not go home unless they paid approximately $400 — effectively held for ransom by their own sponsor.
At least seven former construction workers documented by HRW are now on dialysis with end-stage renal disease — their kidneys destroyed by the combination of heat exposure, inadequate hydration, and working conditions that no medical system monitored until the damage was irreversible. The renal failure is the body’s verdict on the kafala system: it is not merely exploitative but physically destructive, producing chronic disease in workers who entered the country healthy and leave it — if they leave it — with organ damage that will shorten their remaining lives.
The comparison to Qatar is instructive and unflattering to Saudi Arabia. Qatar, facing sustained international pressure during its World Cup construction period, implemented kafala reforms that — while incomplete — produced measurable changes: the introduction of a minimum monthly wage of 1,000 Qatari riyals (effective March 2021), the abolition of the exit permit requirement, the establishment of worker complaint mechanisms with documented usage, and the creation of a Workers’ Support and Insurance Fund. Between November 2020 and August 2022, almost 350,000 workers changed jobs in Qatar — compared to 18,000 in 2019 and 9,000 in 2018. The volume of transfers demonstrates that when reforms are implemented with enforcement, workers use them. The reforms were criticised by human rights organisations as insufficient — HRW noted that “feeble enforcement on the ground has meant those reforms often remain theoretical.” But they were measurably more substantive than Saudi Arabia’s, and Qatar’s advisory Shura Council’s 2024 proposal to require employer permission before migrant workers can leave the country suggests that even incomplete reforms face rollback pressure.
Saudi Arabia’s reforms are characterised by announcement without enforcement. The laws change. The practices do not. The gap between the reformed law and the unreformed reality is the space in which the kafala continues to operate — not as a legal system but as a power dynamic so deeply embedded in the employment relationship that removing it from the statute books does not remove it from the construction site.
The Machine
The kafala is not a relic. It is the engine of Vision 2030’s construction programme.
The Saudi construction sector employs 3.6 million workers — 39 per cent of the private sector workforce. The Saudi migrant workforce has grown approximately 40 per cent since Vision 2030’s launch, reaching 13.2 million. The growth was driven by the labour requirements of the giga-projects: NEOM, Diriyah, Qiddiya, Red Sea Global, the Riyadh Metro, and the infrastructure programmes that the government has prioritised as the megacity thesis collapsed.
Each of these projects requires migrant labour because the Saudi workforce cannot supply the volume of construction workers needed. Saudisation targets — quotas for Saudi national employment in the private sector — apply to commercial and service sectors. They are not meaningfully applied to construction, because the construction labour pool is, by definition, imported. The projects are built by workers who come from abroad, are bound to their employers upon arrival, and are disposable when the project scales down.
The kafala enables this model by ensuring a labour supply that is simultaneously abundant and controlled. The recruitment pipeline delivers workers from South Asia at prices the workers themselves pay. The kafala ensures they stay. The isolation of remote construction sites ensures they comply. The death classification system ensures they disappear without accountability when the conditions kill them. The reforms ensure the international community can be told the system has changed. And the construction continues.
The ILO forced labour complaint filed by BWI in June 2024 under Article 24 of the ILO Constitution was based on this architecture — the interconnected system of debt bondage, employer control, passport confiscation, and restricted mobility that constitutes forced labour under the ILO’s own Forced Labour Convention (No. 29). The complaint was upheld for admissibility in January 2025. Saudi Arabia has not publicly responded to its substance.
The kafala is not a single abuse. It is the machine that produces all the other abuses. It is the reason workers cannot report wage theft — because reporting means risking the employer’s retaliation, which means risking deportation, which means returning home with the debt unpaid. It is the reason workers cannot flee heat exposure — because leaving the site means leaving the sponsor, which means losing legal status. It is the reason workers cannot report gang rape — because accessing law enforcement requires the employer’s cooperation, and the employer’s interest is in the absence of a record, not its creation.
Every paragraph in every human rights report about Vision 2030 — the deaths, the wages, the conditions, the isolation, the classification fraud — is a downstream consequence of the kafala. The system is the story. The abuses are its output. And the output, measured in deaths and dollars and decades of imprisonment for those who resist, is the cost of building a future city on a foundation of trapped labour.
This investigation draws on Human Rights Watch (“Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later,” December 2024); Building and Wood Workers’ International (ILO Article 24 complaint, June 2024; worker survey of 193 migrants); ALQST documentation; FairSquare reporting; ILO Forced Labour Convention (No. 29); Saudi labour reform announcements (2020-2025); the Qiwa platform; Council on Foreign Relations kafala backgrounder; Qatar’s World Cup labour reform record; Middle East Eye; and academic literature on the kafala system. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with NEOM, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.