Price of recruiting Philippine domestic help hits SR22,000

RIYADH: National recruitment offices in the Kingdom have demanded that the Ministry of Labor and Social Development to apply the principle of reciprocity with its counterparts in Manila.
Measures taken by the Philippine authorities were described by national recruitment offices as arbitrary because recruitment offices in the Philippines exploit Saudi regulations which do not allow its national offices to deal with more than two offices.
Saudi regulations stipulate that national recruitment offices should deal with only two outside offices, while Philippine offices are allowed to deal and negotiate with more than 7 offices at the same time, thus allowing them to increase recruitment bills. As a result, the Philippine offices tend to deal with national recruitment offices that agree to higher recruitment costs and not deal with those who don’t raise their costs.
The sources pointed that the total amount needed to recruit Philippine household help reached SR22,000, including the SR20,000 cost of recruiting, and SR2,000 for the visa, with a monthly salary of SR1,500.
“The Philippine Embassy deliberately halts dealings with national offices once a complaint by a domestic worker is filed. The embassy notified several offices in Saudi Arabia that it had temporarily halted all dealings with them,” said the sources.
The sources added that the Ministry of Labor and Social Development is required to take similar measures to stop dealing with recruitment offices in Manila, and to put pressures on the offices there to adhere to signed agreements, especially since the majority of recruitment offices here in the Kingdom are facing great hardships.
On the issue of the required certificate of no previous criminal records for Bangladeshi labor, sources said that matters are still the same and paperwork transactions are still frozen at the Saudi Embassy in Dhaka because the period needed to extract such certificate ranges between 25 to 30 days, which results in the piling up of transactions.
The old transactions are exempted from the decision, nonetheless the offices expressed fear it might incur fines in accordance with the penalty provision stipulating the payment of SR100 for each day of delay in the arrival of the household labor to Saudi Arabia.