Foreign consultants to suggest ways to solve crisis of domestic workers

The current crisis in the domestic labor market has prompted the Ministry of Labor to seek the assistance of consulting firms to resolve the issues particularly with the recruitment of domestics from Indonesia and the Philippines.
A source in the ministry said that the official hiring body is seeking assistance from a number of national and international think tanks in recruiting household help, the latest of which is Stanford Training & Consulting of Stanford University in the US. He said that the ministry is facing difficulties in recruiting domestics due to a number of reasons including the ministry’s poor performance and some social attitudes that have had negative impacts on the governments of labor exporting countries.
In related news, Labor Minister Adel Fakeih said that fake Saudization will not succeed, pointing out that the activities of companies or firms which try to circumvent the law by quoting names of Saudi employees who do not exist on their rolls will be blacklisted.
“Some Saudis use this as an excuse to receive salaries without even working in a real job,” said the minister.
He revealed that his ministry is facing a number of issues of fake Saudization which it is working hard to eliminate and at the same time achieve real job nationalization rates in the private sector.
Fakeih also said that the ministry had detected some firms which use names of citizens in the employment process without their knowledge to achieve the required Saudi percentage.
Earlier, in a meeting at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Fakeih said that the Ministry of Labor will cooperate with the Interior Ministry to criminalize fake Saudization, making it punishable by law.
The minister also announced that unemployment rates had increased by 25 percent in the last five years. He said that 100,000 graduates passed out of the Kingdom’s universities each year while secondary education graduates amounted to 300 000 annually. He also said that the number of job seekers stood at 650,000, the majority of whom are women.