JEDDAH, 5 December 2002 — Two doctors contracted by Scientific and Medical Equipment House (SMEH) and their 6-year-old daughter are being evicted from their residence at the Jubail General Hospital compound after a long battle with management over their employment rights, Arab News has learned.
“I never thought I would be held prisoner by my employer,” Dr. Ajay Poddar said in an interview yesterday. “My wife is crying, I cannot sleep, my father in India is not well... and now we are being evicted. We are at the mercy of SMEH.”
Dr. Ajay Poddar and his wife, Dr. Janaki Poddar, submitted their resignation seven months ago to Dr. Mohammed Mosallami, the hospital management director at SMEH.
Their contract states that they must give four months notice before resigning.
Four months after they tendered their resignations and while waiting for their exit visas and passports, they liquidated their assets in the Kingdom. However, neither the passports nor the visas arrived.
When the Poddars approached Dr. Mosallami about this, they volunteered to stay for another two months, as SMEH had not yet begun looking for replacements for them.
But in early November, the sixth month, when the Poddars again asked Dr. Mosallami for their papers they were told that no clearance would be given for them to leave, as their replacements had still not been found.
“We discovered that no effort had been made by Mosallami to find replacements, so our resignation requests were ignored. My father’s medical condition in India is worsening and we desperately want to return home before it is too late. We were tired of waiting and being ignored, so we stopped showing up for work at the hospital. Two days later, I approached a lawyer in Jubail who drafted a letter to SMEH headquarters in Riyadh. I also threatened to file a complaint with the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. One week has passed, but there had still been no response to this letter,” Dr. Poddar said.
An investigation by Arab News has found that an exit visa was in fact authorized for Dr. Ajay Poddar. However, no exit visa was issued for Dr. Janaki Poddar.
This information flatly contradicts the contents of a letter sent by Dr. Mosallami to this newspaper. A telephone call to Dr. Mosallami, followed by a telephone call to Dr. Modallah Al-Jofy, the Jubail General Hospital liaison to SMEH, unearthed further contradictions in the “facts” as stated in Dr. Mosallami’s written reply.
Dr. Mosallami initially told Arab News: “I have a contractual obligation to provide one OB/GYN doctor to Jubail General Hospital, not two. I have fulfilled my contract by providing a replacement for Dr. Ajay, and therefore the Poddars are free to leave as far as SMEH is concerned. Dr. Al-Jofy and the Ministry of Health are refusing to provide Dr. Janaki Poddar with an exit visa.”
However, according to Dr. Al-Jofy: “All exit visas for SMEH employees, including the Poddars, are the responsibility of SMEH. Neither Jubail General Hospital nor the Ministry of Health gets involved in such things. Such matters are one of the reasons we contract with private companies for staffing and operations requirements. We have no problem with either doctor leaving to India since they have stopped working. The problem is an internal SMEH problem, not a problem with the ministry.”
Dr. Ajay’s response to this dilemma is simple.
“My wife and I gave sufficient notice of four months as was required by our contract and we even extended an extra two months,” he said. “Why are we not being allowed to leave?”
Arab News tried to speak to Dr. Mosallami again to clarify his initial remarks, but he refused to take the telephone calls.
The Poddars’ fate lies with SMEH, not Jubail General Hospital and not with the Ministry of Health.
Attorney Muhammad Jaber Nader, who writes the weekly column “The Law and You” in Arab News, says: “The rule for giving notice is simple. If you have given notice according to the terms of your contract and have worked during the notice period, you should be released. You have the right to stop working.”
The Poddars are among hundreds who find themselves in similar predicaments, caught in a vicious circle where their wellbeing is at the whim of their employers.
“Dr. Mosallami has the power to sign for the exit visa for my wife immediately, but is trying to force us into an even more desperate situation in order to force my wife to return to work. Had we known that we would be imprisoned, we would never have come to SMEH. We are human beings, here to provide a humanitarian service, not prisoners of war,” Dr. Ajay Poddar added.
