> 21,000 people seems like a massive amount of dead. I know that Saudi Arabia and other gulf states abuse foreign workers horribly, but can the death tool really be that high? That works out to 3,000 per year. That seems incredibly high. How can that only be coming out now?

Enormous numbers of people die very frequently without coverage from mainstream corporate media. Your surprise is mostly from the fact that whatever outlets you would expect to be the watchdogs for this sort of thing, haven't been barking.

There have been guerilla documentaries on slave labor in the gulf for years. I believe the one I saw was Vice. They had people working 12 hour days in the sun with no breaks and sleeping in metal shacks with no A/C in the desert.

I think something like 5,000 civilians have been killed in Myanmar with very little western coverage. Not sure how many have been killed in Sudan in the last year but it is in the tens of thousands. Both of these cases have millions of displaced people as well.

I get that those are wars and this is just slavery, but I'm just trying to make the point that unless you go out of your way to consume media outside the mainstream you'll probably miss a lot of this stuff. It is incredibly shocking when you first hear about it.