Saudi Arabia has announced it will establish official domestic worker recruitment programs with nine new countries in Asia.
The oil-rich kingdom, which employs tens of thousands of maids and drivers, will expand its target countries to include Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Laos and India.
Authorities have held meetings in those countries to establish official recruitment programs, it has been reported.
It already recruits 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.
Recently, Saudi Arabia temporarily banned the hiring of Ethiopian maids after a spate of alleged child murders.
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.
“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 percent 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 Labor Ministry to ensure recruitment costs were reasonable and not to give in to the forces of demand and supply in the market.
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