I don't buy this "blaming the mainstream media" for the upteenth time. First of all, looking at your other examples of Myanmar and Sudan, there have been tons of coverage in the mainstream media about those issues.
What the OP is saying about 21000 laborers dying in Saudi Arabian is that huge number would have been noticed by lots of people - and a lot of these people would have had huge incentive to get the word out, and then the "mainstream media" would have had huge incentive to get the word out as well. E.g. wouldn't this have been gigantic news in places like the Philippines and India where many of these laborers come from?
As OP points out, I think the bigger problem is separating out on-the-job deaths from "natural" deaths. I.e. how many deaths would you normally expect from 10M people over 7 years?
My guess is that it's some combination of (a) truly awful slave-like conditions, (b) just general "lack of safety culture" conditions (e.g. ~100 people died building the Hoover Dam - I don't think people considered them slaves but they definitely weren't following OSHA rules), (c) accidental deaths that happen in any large project over this amount of time, and (d) natural deaths. The journalistic challenge is that it's difficult to tease out these different causes.
What the OP is saying about 21000 laborers dying in Saudi Arabian is that huge number would have been noticed by lots of people - and a lot of these people would have had huge incentive to get the word out, and then the "mainstream media" would have had huge incentive to get the word out as well. E.g. wouldn't this have been gigantic news in places like the Philippines and India where many of these laborers come from?
As OP points out, I think the bigger problem is separating out on-the-job deaths from "natural" deaths. I.e. how many deaths would you normally expect from 10M people over 7 years?
My guess is that it's some combination of (a) truly awful slave-like conditions, (b) just general "lack of safety culture" conditions (e.g. ~100 people died building the Hoover Dam - I don't think people considered them slaves but they definitely weren't following OSHA rules), (c) accidental deaths that happen in any large project over this amount of time, and (d) natural deaths. The journalistic challenge is that it's difficult to tease out these different causes.