"Epic construction site in the Saudi desert is a hazard for workers,"

Billed as a futuristic city-state with dazzling architecture including parallel 106-mile-long skyscrapers taller than the Empire State Building, Neom is the centerpiece of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plans to transform his oil-rich country into a modern diversified economy.

But for its 100,000 workers, the world’s biggest construction project has been more like a dystopia.

Neom employees have reported incidents of gang rape, suicide, attempted murder and drug dealing on the site, slated to cover an area the size of Massachusetts. Last year, a McKinsey consultant died in a head-on crash at night even after safety staff warned Neom management about the danger of driving late on the region’s roads. Laborers at one of the migrant worker camps mounted a violent protest over frustration with food. Children as young as 8 have been caught driving trucks.

Current and former Neom staff say the incidents illustrate what can go wrong when so many people arrive in an isolated part of the world to build a highly ambitious project on an unrealistically aggressive timetable...

“Protecting the welfare of those working on-site is a top priority,” a Neom spokesperson said. She added that contractors and third parties have to comply with Neom’s welfarstandards, and that Neom investigates inappropriate workplace behaviors as well as any allegations of wrongdoing or misconduct. Neom’s safety management system is based on international standards and audited by the British Safety Council, a U.K.-based nonprofit, she said...

Construction deaths—a feature of any megaproject—have been relatively sparse. Neom reported eight workplace fatalities last year.... That puts the project’s safety record roughly on par with the construction industry in the U.S., which reported 9.6 deaths per 100,000 employees in 2022... Former employees caution the tally could be higher because some deaths likely go unreported...

One of those who died a few months after the all-hands meeting was Abdul Wali Khan, a 25-year-old worker for China Communications Services, a Neom subcontractor. He died last December when a metal gate being installed at Neom’s healthcare center fell on him, according to a Neom list of workplace fatalities.

His brother, Meer Wali Khan, said he struggled for weeks to repatriate Abdul’s body to Pakistan. The body was transported to a hospital in Tabuk, but staff there refused to release it, because there was no police report of the incident, Khan said.

Khan said China Comservice couldn’t explain why there was no police report, telling him that Neom was responsible for logging the death rather than the police. Eventually Comservice, which didn’t respond to requests for comment, wrote an incident report that Khan took to the police who then issued a letter for the hospital, Khan said...

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