The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will recruit maids and drivers from 12 Asian countries, including Bangladesh, as it has been facing shortage of those types of workers recently.
The other Asian countries are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, Laos and India.The oil-rich kingdom, which employs tens of thousands of maids and drivers, already recruited those from locations such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Ethiopia and Sri Lanka but the kingdom is facing a shortage due to disagreements with those countries, mostly over treatment of workers and their rights.
The Middle East’s premier business news portal arabianbusiness.com recently reported that Saudi Arabia has already announced to establish official domestic worker recruitment programmes and the authorities
concerned have held meetings with those Asian countries in this regard.
Contacted, manpower and employment secretary Jafar Ahmed Khan told the news agency that the ministry was yet to get any formal letter from the KSA in this regard.
He, however, said the KSA authorities might have been contacted our Consul office in Saudi Arabia.
Recently, Saudi Arabia temporarily banned the hiring of Ethiopian maids after a spate of alleged child murders, according to arabianbusiness.com.
However, a recruitment officer has warned widening the pool of potential domestic workers would not solve the shortage problem in the near future. Hiring from new countries would require training and education on both sides, arabianbusiness.com said.
‘Saudi families are not familiar with the lifestyles of most of the people in the Central Asian republics even if majority of the people in those countries are Muslims,’ director of a recruitment agency in Riyadh, Fahd Al Qahtani, told Arab News.
Another labour recruitment agent, Naif Al Otaiby, said labour exporting countries, including those with high unemployment levels, were unjustifiably demanding high rates for domestic workers.
As the largest labour market in the region, Saudi Arabia should dictate employment terms and not supplying nations, he said.
‘Most of the labour export companies in those countries demand nearly 60 per cent higher wages to supply domestic workers to the kingdom than to other countries in the Gulf,’ Al Otaiby told Arab News.
He also called on recruitment agencies and the labour ministry to ensure recruitment costs were reasonable and not to give in to the forces of demand and supply in the market, the arabianbusiness.com said.
-With New Age input
