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The Alleged Human Cost of Progress in Saudi Arabia
71 Plays2 months ago
This week, Jason and Carlos tackle the serious topic of the human cost of construction, citing the ITV documentary Kingdom Uncovered, which alleges that 21,000 workers have lost their lives on various Saudi projects. To help them understand this situation better, they have enlisted the help of an engineer with experience on those projects to shed more light.
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Transcript
Introduction and Pre-Holiday Break
00:00:00
Speaker
yeah To recap some of the stats, not only has it been reported 21,000 foreign workers have been killed since 2017, there's allegedly an additional 100,000 workers missing.
00:00:20
Speaker
Welcome back to the off-site podcast in our second final episode before a nice little resty poo break for Christmas.
Tech Company of the Year Win
00:00:32
Speaker
I'm Jason Lansini and joined by co-host Carlos Caballo. How are you, mate? Well, good. Thank you. Apart from this cough cold thing that I picked up. I wish I was hungover. No, I'm a bit under the weather, but stiff up and let me keep going. It's all good.
00:00:48
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. Very good. Very good. Uh, I, I will, we're coming off a high having, uh, just spent a week down in Melbourne and had the pleasure of winning a tech company of the year at project controls expo.
00:01:03
Speaker
goes ah ah So it was nice to go down and collect, uh, on behalf of everyone else's hard work, you know, go to the dinner, drink the drinks, get the award, do the speech. Uh, superstar.
00:01:17
Speaker
No, really well done. Yeah, it's a yeah, Tech Company of the Year, Project Horizon Expo. It's not a small event. It's not an easy award to win. So um yeah, awesome to see.
Mamoot's Record-Breaking Crane
00:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, awesome. Any cool ah fun facts to share with us today?
00:01:32
Speaker
I know how much you love a crane. It's like second only to concrete. yeah actually actually i much provoke you know i'm ah I'm a qualified lift designer, Carlos, and I actually love cranes more than concrete. ah there So a concrete boom must be your your sweet spot. now They're a bit boring. not i i actually I spent years doing the like you know the calculations of the the lift and the rigging and everything. I love it. those Well, there's a new crane that Mamoot has. It's Mamoot. I'm saying that right. It is Mamoot. I'm just looking for my wallet. I have a Mamoot wallet somewhere here. ah oh Probably the only person in the world that has a Mamoot wallet. I hold it up to the camera. There we go. Wow, look at that. You did have a crane.
00:02:23
Speaker
I do love a crane. They have now built the world or they've just completed the the the testing of the world's what will be the world's strongest land-based crane. It's one and a half times stronger than the previous strongest. um It can lift 6,000 tons but the most impressive stat that I saw was it's got 170 meter long boom and it can lift at full reach 3,000 tons. It can move 220 meters without moving just by swinging.
00:02:52
Speaker
So that's quite a lift over a major site. Yeah, that's a that's a big crane ah for sure. And what is crazy is, as you said, that is going to be or is the world's strongest land-based crane. Fun fact, if you were to rank land-based cranes, static cranes, marine cranes from strongest to weakest,
00:03:22
Speaker
What order would you put them in? I have a feeling Maureen will be the strongest. then well, static then land. ah No, close. Yeah. dead So static, you can, thinking can sort talk static is the, there's one, there's a Chinese one that does 20,000 metric tons. But yeah, the, the, the little, the little reveal is yeah, how crazily epic some of the, um,
00:03:53
Speaker
ah barge cranes and marine cranes are. There is a ah sort of two crane combo that was seventeen lifted 17,000 tonnes in 2022. Is that for oil rigs and things like that? It's some sort of offshore oil rig, something something like that. Marine cranes are staunch.
00:04:11
Speaker
I have no information to go into a conversation about this, but I'd imagine it's pretty complicated in terms of keeping things level or when you're on water too. Yeah, there's some level stuff. There's some moving around stuff that makes it hard as well, because you get dynamic loading. Anyway, fun topic.
Worker Deaths Allegations in Saudi Vision 2030
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, so this week we've got ah two topics that we're gonna dive into, both fairly meaty. So first we're gonna dive into a recent ah ITV documentary that has uncovered allegations of 21,000 worker deaths on and Vision 2030 projects in Saudi Arabia, ah which is shocking if true. And then we're gonna dive into the big news also out of Saudi Arabia in the last week or two, which is the opening of the massive Riyadh Metro, um which is a major Metro project that has been underway for more than 10 years there. In the conversation regarding ah the alleged deaths on the 2030 project,
00:05:15
Speaker
we are going to or We prior to this interviewed an engineer that worked on the project for a period of time for one of the large international contractors or consultants. ah For their anonymity, the interview will be reread by producer Olu, who is going to do his best rereading of the interview. um So thank ah both Olu and the engineer for the discussion.
00:05:39
Speaker
Well, let's dive into the first topic. So we're discussing, I guess, ah prompted by the recent ITV documentary, Kingdom Uncovered inside Saudi Arabia. It brought to light an uncomfortable and just disturbing conversation about the human cost of progress in major infrastructure projects associated to the Vision 2030 scheme in Saudi Arabia.
00:06:07
Speaker
At a headline, the documentary claimed that over 21,000 workers from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal have lost their lives since 2017 while working on various aspects of the Saudi Vision 2030, which includes things like the futuristic megacity NEOM.
00:06:29
Speaker
Despite these allegations, international consultants and contractors continue to play a significant role in the in the region and ah related countries in the vision of continuing to build major infrastructure. so In this conversation, we are joined by an engineer that has worked for one of those large international um contractors or consultants that has worked specifically on one of the Vision 2030 projects and has been kind enough to under some anonymity have a conversation about
00:07:06
Speaker
um the kind of ah what it's like to work on the projects and some of the internal tension and and discussion around the morality of ah working on um and contributing to projects that could potentially have the human cost that's been been reported. so So Carlos and I guess maybe opening up, I might dive in with a few of the overarching statistics of the project um and and dive in or all the news and dive in from there into what people's initial thoughts are. But yeah, to recap some of the stats, not only has it been reported 21,000 foreign workers have been killed since 2017, there's allegedly an additional 100,000 workers missing.
00:07:56
Speaker
ah The documentary highlighted a whole bunch of ah workplace issues like 16-hour work shifts, poor safety measures, ah terrible living conditions, a bunch of like epic heat exposure. One of the biggest issues is the disparity between the reported um ah fatality rate on construction projects. The official rate calculates out to be 1.12 deaths per 100,000 workers.
00:08:29
Speaker
um And if you back calculate the reported numbers against the total construction worker pool in the country, it's something like a thousand times worse than that.
00:08:43
Speaker
um so There's a massive disparity between official numbers and and what this report um or this ITV documentary is alleging.
Moral Dilemmas for Western Companies
00:08:52
Speaker
Maybe start just go straight to you and get a sense of, as someone that's got experience of working on these projects, the state of of what it's like to deliver a project in these regions was, I guess, somewhat known before this documentary. what's the What was your feeling when you saw the either documentary or or the article?
00:09:12
Speaker
I mean, the documentary is pretty harrowing, right? There's no two ways about that. Having seen the workforce out there, I think it was pretty difficult to quantify the numbers that were reported with the practices that I saw on one of the neon-the-line projects for short. But then again, you only get a snapshot when you're working on neon-the-line of a particular pool of workers. There are an enormous amount of self-employed workers.
00:09:35
Speaker
particularly the haulers drivers, that you have no idea just where they exist. You see them driving their trucks, they don't live in the compounds, they don't share the compound space with white-collar workers. So that's just a huge number of the workforce that's unaccounted for. So you never quite know, I mean 21,000 is a big number.
00:09:55
Speaker
What do we, I don't know if you have a view or Carlos, if you have a view of like, of, and if anyone's disputed the, other than obviously the Saudi government has disputed the validity of the numbers? I mean, the three consultancies haven't said anything about it. um So when I was working on the project, I knew of two deaths and one operative that was paralyzed from the neck down. And that was due to incidences regarding pile cage construction,
00:10:25
Speaker
and backfilling against an unreinforced wall. And effectively, the control measures just weren't put in place. It's just program is king out there. So safe systems of work often, I wouldn't say they go out the window, but they're not implemented with as much rigor as they would be in Europe or Australia.
00:10:44
Speaker
yeahp It's really difficult because um I guess from a a lot of the, I guess the the stats and the information that we have are from journalists trying to uncover truths. So because there's not, especially in the UK, safety records, that information is very public. It's very clear. um And you can sort of understand a bit more, but it's really hard to know where this sits in terms of contracts or sections or projects. Because one thing I'm trying to work out in my own mind is if these Western contractors are winning contracts, they will promote and I guess adhere to global safety standards in theory. Is there this big difference between each contractor, Western contractor with these global safety standards or against local contractor? And is that actually where the numbers could skew because
00:11:33
Speaker
you'd like to think that these massive organizations don't drop everything when they turn up at these projects and just do whatever the the local sort of practices. Um, and it's quite loose. It seems in particularly Saudi Arabia where it pretty much says the safety standards are dictated by the project. It's not a centralized sort of set of controls and governance. Yeah. I think if we like double click into the, there's like this report of like a thousand times worse outcomes than I guess the official statistics and it's like mega hard to validate.
00:12:09
Speaker
any of those numbers. And there's a lot of people trying to validate, you you know, what is truth now. And so is is, I guess, the thing you're asking Carlos is, is it magically not happening on the sections that like a European contractor might be running? um is it Is it somehow happening on Yeah, because the, the rate that they're claiming is better than most European countries rate. So the official rate thing. Yeah, the official rate is better than Italy, Spain, Australia, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, only the UK and Germany have a better rate than Saudi's claimed rate. Yep. So yes, there's this, it would be interesting to understand based on who's running each contract, what that actually looks like. But then also, if
00:12:54
Speaker
The reports, the documentary and the reports suggest that a lot of these deaths are related to heat, exhaustion, um the crazy hours that they're being made to do. So I wonder if in in their world they say that's not a fatality and a construction project. They didn't fall off something or are like hit by a piece of machinery. So how they get back to that number would be an interesting thing to see.
00:13:19
Speaker
I don't think anyone would be super shocked to know that the 1.12 is probably like understated, but it's still ah like it's like a thousand times different to the the alleged rate. So there's there's some delta there that just isn't adding up. Yeah. So that 1.12 figure.
00:13:34
Speaker
Let's say you look at the program partners of each of these Vision 2030 programs. I wouldn't be surprised if 1.12 per 100,000 reflected, contracted, and employed workers. But there's a vast pool of workers that are not contracted. They would be self-employed. The labor, the drivers, the haulers' drivers,
00:13:55
Speaker
I mean, that's effectively what these projects are at the moment. They're just massive Earthworks projects. I think a lot of those are self-employed. Therefore, they wouldn't necessarily come under employment law as such. So that figure that Saudi Arabia is publishing, you can massage the statistics in whatever way, shape or form to suit the person.
00:14:16
Speaker
But if they've discounted all the self-employed workers, then yeah, of course there's going to be a striking disparity. And it's usually the same in the UK, where you typically don't have the same rights as an employee.
00:14:29
Speaker
one of the One of the things that is interesting below the surface of all this is that, and I was shocked to learn that ah in 2022, out of approximately 2.45, 2.5 million workers in Saudi, um approximately 85% were foreign workers, predominantly as we said at the start, India, Nepal, Bangladesh.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah, if these statistics are correct and, you know, along the lines of what you just said, there's like a real like racial inequity that is also baked into the whole thing. So, yeah, I guess as a bit of a backstory, when I started working on Neon the Line, I had to do a cultural induction to understand the way of working in Saudi Arabia.
00:15:19
Speaker
and there's a bit of an honor system within Saudi. So Saudi nationals take all the top jobs and then it would be like the Western, Western-based companies or the white people if you like, or Western-educated would then take the kind of second tier of jobs and they would create the ideas and massage them and then pass them over to the Saudi nationals.
00:15:41
Speaker
And then the Saudi nationals can cascade that down and they get all the praise for it. And then you've got the hierarchy system whereby the Indians, the Bangladeshis, the Nepalese, Pakistani, they're really in a separate class system of their own for sure. And if you look at the way the working camps are set up, you have a white collar camp and then you have a labor camp. ah So you've got a ring-fenced huge rectangular compound You have a gate or a metal fence that separates white collar workers and then the blue collar workers. So the white collar workers get their own cabin, their own bed, their own suite. It's basic, but it's it's your own space. And the blue collar workers typically get six to 12 to a dorm, shared wash facilities. You do eat together, which is nice.
00:16:34
Speaker
But there's definitely clear segregation between white and blue collar workers. ah And so, yeah, there is a massive cultural system in Saudi Arabia, which no Western company can go into in the Saudi system and try and change that current hierarchy. ah That's just going to have to change um over time, you know, generations. And it's probably linked to religion as well, which is obviously really difficult to change.
00:17:01
Speaker
So as a you know I guess one of the things that we wanted to have dive into on the back of this conversation is if we think about putting ourselves in the shoes and and and I guess as you were of European or Western ah multinational consultant or contractor that is bidding or wanting to deliver work.
00:17:22
Speaker
in the region are what in some reports is supposed to grow to be the world's largest construction market or infrastructure construction market over the next whatever period. There's like an underlying ethical or moral tension. um To what extent do you think that ah should play in to any decision, ah for like a business decision and or for employees. and And then also, I guess on the back of that, to what extent do you think it does or from your experience does it um play in?
00:17:55
Speaker
Yeah, so there's a couple of avenues to explore here. Number one, as a sweeping stereotype, I think the actions and decisions of engineers have come from a place of good intent. You know, there's a number of OPEC countries that at the moment their main economy is totally reliant on fossil fuels. And as Western countries have already been through their industrial revolution,
00:18:16
Speaker
we're now effectively forcing the rest of the world to change their practices. So there's a number of countries that need to relook at how they're going to fund their own economies. So from an engineering perspective, I think you go into Saudi and you say, yes, we can help develop this country from like an ethical, from a human rights perspective, from a safety perspective, from an economy perspective, from an infrastructure perspective.
00:18:43
Speaker
And when you're writing the bids, you're putting in all the right things into that bid that can help that country. And what you don't necessarily account for is the cultural differences and the difficulty that you're going to be faced with when you land that contract and that you have to massage the culture. It's like turning an oil tank around on a pinhead. That's the ah the analogy.
00:19:04
Speaker
It's yeah really difficult to change the direction and the energy of these countries. That's just culturally ingrained. So I think the intent is an honest one. And I think that people go out there with good honest intentions, whether it's a status thing about working on the biggest and the best infrastructure project in the world, whether it's you want to change it from a human rights perspective, whether you want to enhance the safety culture in a new country.
00:19:28
Speaker
When you get there and realize that it's so difficult to make changes Then you fall into two camps you either put up and shut up and take the money or you say actually Morally, this doesn't feel comfortable with me and you walk away The issue with walking away is that whilst we call it Saudi vision 2030 Saudi have come out and said Actually, we're not stupid. It's going to likely be more 2050 or Vision 2060. So when you're looking at your pipeline of work for a multinational consultancy or contractor, you do need to be thinking about business.
00:20:04
Speaker
So it's a it's a real moral dilemma for these businesses to either say ah we're in it for the long run and we're going to try our damn hardest to change the culture of a country. We're just going to take a generation or you can take the avenue of let's say employee owned company and say, actually, this isn't for us. Yeah, I think the I think the key takeaway in in like so many of these things they're They're not black or white ah decisions. They're complex things. There's, as you mentioned, there's like there's all sorts of reasons to ah view contributing to the project as positive. ah Yet there's the reality on the ground of like potentially this kind of like thousand times worse than, ah let's say, market fatality rate.
00:20:57
Speaker
How do you think the, what's the sort of general conversation I guess from your experience or from your observation around the typical justifications that people kind of either tell themselves or companies tell themselves around why yes. And just to add to that slightly, are they conversations that are happening within these organizations? Like is it something that's ignored or is it something that you would discuss as teams or around like the values of the organization and being a member of the ICA and things like that. Is it is it open? And do you sort of get to discuss or is it quite under the radar? So they're not open conversations. The questions have been asked in the company that I work for and the response was robustly business.
00:21:50
Speaker
So if you throw an ethical or moral question to a business leader, they're very good at not just having a human conversation with you, but giving you a business response. And because you're an employee, it's really difficult to argue against a revenue based answer because fundamentally you're there to work. You know, you, you're almost duty bound to be helping them with their revenue targets. From a personal experience, I went out there for two reasons. Number one,
00:22:20
Speaker
as an engineer was to work on, at the time, the world's most iconic, stupid and crazy project. It was to work in a new environment and a new culture, which really excites me. But also, I naively thought that we would be able to have a positive impact on how these countries deliver and their fatality rates, as well as their safety standards. I remember having a conversation with my brother about it. Actually, I said, am I doing the right thing?
00:22:48
Speaker
Because morally, this doesn't sit right with me. I'm a chartered engineer, I have a professional code of conduct, which I think is a really good framework to operate professionally under. Is this the right thing to do? And you can justify a narrative in any way that suits you, right? So I justified it with a bit of naivety, a bit of culture, and a bit of, this is a stupid project and it would be cool to have this on my CV. But then, 18 months into the project, when we realized it was too difficult to implement anything of meaningful substance,
00:23:18
Speaker
all of my colleagues and I stepped away from the project. And it was a very nice sort of, okay, we've done that, but this is the reality. So now we can go into new experiences with our eyes open. But yeah, in terms of as a team, I think we discussed the morality as a team, but we were all trying to implement good, safe standards, safe systems of work, and safe build methodologies.
00:23:43
Speaker
from a business perspective, we didn't really have the open friend conversations that I think people crave these days because, you know, our eyes are all open to it. Yeah, I think that's that opens an interesting question. Like as you kind of alluded to, there's a there's a common thought process or at least from from my observation of people discussing this topic and related topics that, you know, the justification The justification is, okay, big multinational or international contractor or consultant comes into the project and good for them, they can make a bunch of
Contractors' Influence on Safety Standards
00:24:18
Speaker
money. They can also bring in their standards and keep helping lift the standard of that country's construction market. In any research, I spent a bunch of time researching that in preparation for this discussion. There's just no evidence of that.
00:24:36
Speaker
really anywhere. There was a bunch of research into ah Qatar ah infrastructure projects um and prior Saudi projects. and And so I guess the open question is what influence does a, whether it's a project management consultant, a design consultant, or a contractor have over the safety standards of how projects are delivered versus Say a client. So I would say it depends on the individuals actually managing the projects. A Western consultant has their own safety standards but it's down to the employees to implement. And the Middle East is a pretty unique area because I feel like there's a number of individuals that just do the Middle East circuit. They bounce from jobs from Dubai, they cashed in in Dubai, they went to Abu Dhabi, they cashed in in Abu Dhabi, they went to Qatar.
00:25:29
Speaker
And now they're in Saudi. So whilst the UK and Europe safety standards have increased, you know, either linearly or exponentially since the 1990s, there are individuals that are now senior individuals within these organizations that are just peddling the same practices they've peddled around Dubai. They go, yeah, well, you know, the Indians, the Bangladeshis and the police. Yeah, they come to the country. And of course, they're going to be working in worse conditions than we are.
00:25:56
Speaker
That's just the way we operate. You know, I'm an advocate of more parity. So if you always do what you've always done, you're always going to get out what you've always got. And if you're using the same people with the same mentality and the same culture, it doesn't really matter what organization they go to. You know, they could go to the farm industry or other real safety critical industries. They're just going to operate with the same, well, I'm just here to get the job done mentality.
00:26:22
Speaker
and they're cash driven as opposed to being cash and outcome driven. Carlos, what you you know like I guess ah one observation or one thought process is if we think about the kind of um the feedback mechanism in, say, the UK or other markets like Australia, where ah safety standards basically drive your eligibility to bid certain projects, and that's really instigated from like the client or the government, ah whoever it is.
00:26:53
Speaker
ah no Do you have any thoughts on you know at the end of the day, is it really the is it really the ultimate client of the project that is kind of setting the standard and then the and the whole project delivery service will just kind of fit at the level that they ask for? There's definitely a sense that Saudi are trying to almost run into a bi-type model where they can be self-reliant on tourism and not oil and the old mechanism for generating revenue and I'd imagine they can't get to this vision with safety standards in place because of the cost.
00:27:29
Speaker
And then that will trickle down to these contractors trying to win bids. If they price those bids with all Western safety standards and cultures around everything down to the labor on site, they're probably not going to win a job because the price would be so much higher when the clients would say,
00:27:45
Speaker
This is not the bid that we asked for in line with the requirements that we have. So I do think it's the clients that ultimately are driving this because they probably wouldn't accept a bid with a cost associated with it to to run the project in the way that they should based on Western.
00:28:01
Speaker
And probably even if they bid it at that price, you're fighting against culture to a degree. Like even if you did say, I was going to do it, you've got the there reports like 140,000 workers on that on just on Neup, for example. yeah And so there's no way you can change the the the thing that people have been doing for 15, 20 years or whatever on your project alone.
00:28:25
Speaker
and turn it on a dime if that's how they've built projects. 140,000 people. well like you'll just You'll get dragged. fail like It has to be a ah a general lifting of all all standards across. And I don't believe that any contractors are naive to this. It's not the first project in the Middle East with a record like this. like Going back to the kind of moral ah dilemma or the yeah the consideration of do you go into the market or do you not, there's an interesting ah other kind of justification or ah thought exercise that people would do, which is like
00:29:04
Speaker
I'm an architect, so I don't really govern the safety of what happens on the site. I just is just draw the building or whatever I do. I'm a structural engineer, so I don't control what happens on site. I just do the calculations for the size of the beam or whatever it is.
00:29:21
Speaker
And then you get to like, well, I'm the, I'm like, I'm the project management consultant. The contractor runs the the job. And then you're like, I'm the prime contractor, but we're subbing out all the work. So the subbies are actually in control of the people. like So there's kind of this like delegation of agency that happens, uh, like can happen all the way down to, you know, as you're saying, like a self-employed person just driving around the truck. Even software vendors, right? You could say that your software can help coordinate site or improve safety
Saudi Cultural System's Impact on Projects
00:29:50
Speaker
standards. So that again could be, well, we're going to take this contract because we think we can improve things, which is the same thing that contractors are doing. And you're naive to
00:29:59
Speaker
like the outcome. So there's definitely that. That's the model that could actually really change or steer the barge on the on the pin, which is you probably need the whole set of organizations to start to be more vocal or just not go for contracts in these areas to stop it happening because they've got clearly a stream of every contractor in the world looking to win these big contracts. And unless the whole pack sort of make a start take a stance on safety and everything we've spoken about today, it's really hard to see that change happening in any sort of rate. And now that the vision is 2050, that's a lot of time to try and actually make a positive change in and what they're doing, but it's really hard to imagine it happening.
00:30:46
Speaker
Do you remember a couple of years ago HS2 tried to release a scope of works for I think it was the stations in Birmingham and the contractors picked up the tender pack and were like we're not signing up to this and so they just refused to put in a bid.
00:31:03
Speaker
And then HS2 went, we're going to have to rethink this. Then they engaged with the contractors and said, you need to give us some feedback on what makes this bid compliant for you to actually put a price in for it. And fair play to HS2. It does take quite a mature kind of client to do that because HS2 then went out.
00:31:23
Speaker
ah They amended the scope or the contracts, amended the kind of risk profile, and then they got suitable tender responses. And now we've got a couple of contractors on that building those stations. So that was an informed decision by some people may argue this, but by a mature client. And they're mature because they're operating within Western standards or European standards with professional engineers that have matured with the industry's maturity in the UK and Europe.
00:31:52
Speaker
To be clear, they they didn't bid based on an assessment of risk or cost transfer rather than safety. Yeah, to be absolutely. So the difficulty is that you can't really do that in Saudi Arabia or or the Middle East because Saudi could just go to China or somewhere like that and China would say, yeah, we'll comply. And then it's a case of you're either in it and you're over the course of a generation, massaging, implementing, taking baby steps to bring a whole country that's the 14th largest country in the world up to your standards. And there's a whole culture there just to navigate through. So it's gonna take a lot of time. And so you're either in it and you're helping the client and you're developing and you're growing together, or you're not, and you don't have an impact. And you can just go, oh yeah, these 21,000 deaths are awful.
00:32:42
Speaker
So it's a case of morally, would you rather be in it or not? Would you rather take the cash and have an influence or just be a bystander? And I think that's the biggest moral dilemma that I had. And I was like, I don't want to be a bystander. Why would I do that? I've got some great ideas. I come from an ethically grounded position. So let's go in there and try to have a positive influence rather than just go, I'm going to wave a flag that anyone who works on Vision 2030 is a bad person.
00:33:10
Speaker
Yeah, so final final question then um is, you know back to your example of the HS2 contract, there's this sort of feedback mechanism, right? there's Or there's a countervailing incentive um to not bid the job if the if the ah risk is unbalanced or yeah you don't think you can make money on it as a contractor?
00:33:37
Speaker
It seems to me that it's it's unclear what, if any, the the same thing is um for consultants, contractors working on a major project in a in a developing or um less ah highly safety conscious region to um what is the countervailing force that would would make them think twice or would ah help the standards increase. I'd imagine there's some like employee part of this that that is really like the the main thing because if the client isn't lifting the standard, because from a safety perspective in like the UK, it's the you know you just can't bid the job. If you're standard if you're not at the standard, you're not you're not bidding the job. there's just isn't that There isn't that feedback mechanism. It's unclear what it is.
00:34:29
Speaker
And actually, all of the companies that are bidding for these works do have exceptional safety standards in house. You know, yeah what they profess, what they preach and the inductions and their reporting is actually all really robust. You can gloss the stats up and the client goes, my God, this person's brilliant. And the client thinks that they're employing that person to run their job. But as we said in Saudi, I just think it's just cultural. If you're using the same people time and time again, you're going to get the same results time and time again.
00:34:58
Speaker
And it's really, really difficult because of that honor system in Saudi Arabia just to bulldoze your way in. It's really difficult to have open, frank conversations. So, for example, you employ me to do a job and you're not letting me perform at the level that I know I can perform at.
00:35:15
Speaker
I would want to say to you, Jason, you've employed me to do a job. You're not letting me do the job to the safety standards that I require to operate safety and to operate to my standards. So you either have to let me do what I know is right, and you have to support me, or you have to find someone else to replace me. You can't really have that open conversation.
00:35:36
Speaker
and it needs to happen for sure. But that's the Saudi system. It just blocks you from having a really open frank conversation.
Engineer Faces Moral Dilemmas in Saudi Projects
00:35:44
Speaker
Imagine trying to have that conversation with the funder or MBS when he comes to the site and MBS goes, how's the job going? Imagine saying, well mate, you're not letting me operate in a safe way. I've apparently got 21,000 people dying, like what the hell's going on? Yeah, good luck with that.
00:36:01
Speaker
On that theoretical question, Thor, thank you very much for taking the time to have the conversation. it is yeah it's both It's both incredibly like principled and um and brave to to have this conversation, but also to to do what you've done in your organization and and make decisions that might have been like financially worse for you or whatever to based on principles. So take my hat off to that.
00:36:27
Speaker
On to better
Riyadh Metro's Grand Opening
00:36:29
Speaker
news. um On 1st of December, four days ago, as of of recording, after all more than a decade of construction, the Riyadh Metro officially opened its doors to the public, unveiling one of the largest metro systems in the world, spanning 176 kilometers and featuring 85 stations. The state of the artwork network was designed and is designed to revolutionize transport in the ah the kingdom.
00:36:58
Speaker
in the kingdom's capital. The metro has automated driverless trains that can carry up to 3.6 million passengers daily once fully operational and it promises to leave traffic congestion and improve air quality in a city whose I think I read ah population has grown by more than 40% since the um project commenced. So you'd want to be getting your ah demand forecasting pretty spawn. Either everyone's really happy with that 40% going, this was really worth it, or some people who did the initial planning for the project and expected it to go 20% are like slightly shit and bricks.
00:37:40
Speaker
Yeah, good summary there. No, it's a pretty massive scheme. um And for context for anyone listening, so there's this this Metro project has six lines. They they got the green light just in 2012. So it's quite an impressive timeline that they've turned this around in.
00:38:00
Speaker
In true Saudi style, they want they built and released all six lines concurrently. It seems like a ah challenge in itself when you think about not just building, but logistically, the that imagine the city with 85 stations under construction, um these tunneling jobs, everything, um it must have been pretty chaotic. um And in terms of population, there's seven million people in that city, ah London's nine. So that's that is a lot of people Um, trying to navigate around 85 stations and everything else that comes with it. Um, even commissioning a job like that. Why would you do them all at the same time? Seems a bit bizarre, but yeah. So the population was growing by 40% cars. That's why if they didn't, they were in, they're in serious trouble. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Um, $22 billion. dollars Um, we'll dig into the depths of that number based on our last conversation, but, uh,
00:38:54
Speaker
At the surface level, it seems quite good value, but um some of the contractors involved, the ones we often speak about, WeBuild, Bombardier, Last in the Turbo, Atkins, FCC, Samsung. um So yeah, lots of Western contractors involved in this scheme. The stats... There was also included was the a manufacturing contract for 183 trains.
00:39:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's really serious stuff. Yeah. um Yeah, so they think the scheme will save 400,000 litres of petrol per day. It's quite a cool stat that I've never seen yeah tied to a project like this before. um But the thing that I found quite crazy was it is designed to accommodate three and a half million passengers a day. To put that into context, TFL manage 5 million passengers a day. So that they really are expecting this to be the way that people move through the city, um replacing cars. I'd imagine that number is boosted or inflated to account for the assumption that Saudi will become a tourist hub.
00:39:58
Speaker
You can't imagine everyone local ditching cars and riding a tube every single day at the flick of a switch. So yeah, huge project. A whole series of lines that produces kind of a grid across the city with a sort of central loop tying you to the airports too. So not a small one.
00:40:18
Speaker
Yeah, super interesting project. ah The amount of work happening concurrently was really impressive. A bunch of the stations were designed by ah the Zazaha did. Architecture firm, ah really iconic looking stations, like something you'd where you'd imagine it is in the Middle East when you look at a picture of it. But yeah, not something that you would typically see elsewhere. And yeah, probably like in contrast to the prior discussion,
00:40:46
Speaker
there aren't available stats. So I ah wouldn't want to hazard a guess of what the safety record of this project was. But you know in terms of a bunch of international consultants and contractors coming together to to have a fundamentally ah major impact on the leveling up of ah of a city to improve mobility. And ah yeah, it's, ah I guess, a contrast to the the prior conversation. I guess proving that yeah it's it's nothing's ever quite black or white.
00:41:16
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. Well, that was a super interesting conversation. Carlos, do you want to read us out, mate?
Conclusion and Final Episode Announcement
00:41:25
Speaker
No problem. Thank you. Thank you very much, everyone, for tuning into today's show. If you did enjoy today's episode, please do think about liking this video or following us on your chosen podcast platform. We really appreciate your support. And we'll catch you all for the final episode of the year next week. Bye bye.