5-year ban on runaways urged

Recruitment firms here want the government to blacklist and ban runaway domestic workers for five years.
This was the proposal made at a workshop held at the Makkah Chamber of Commerce and Industry organized by the Badawood recruiting firm on the hurdles facing private hiring companies in the Kingdom.
About 100 managers and owners of recruitment firms across the Kingdom attended the workshop.
Participants at the gathering said Saudi sponsors are losing lots of money because of these runaway workers, including having to pay SR2,000 to have the visa of such a worker canceled. In addition, the recruitment company has to bear the cost of deporting the worker to his or her home country.
The workshop participants also suggested that they should establish a cooperative to oversee the work of the 360 hiring firms operating in the Kingdom.
Yaseen Al-Jafri, a lawyer, said the Ministry of Labor wants to regulate the market and protect the Kingdom's reputation internationally. This means that recruitment offices should have a body to represent them, particularly in their interactions with various government bodies, and to ensure that they can assess the strengths and weaknesses of current policies.
Participants alleged that the Labor Ministry had not been acting in their interest by signing an agreement that resulted in Indonesian hiring companies not dealing directly with Saudi recruiting firms.
They also claimed that the ministry had not updated 14-year-old legislation on recruiting foreign workers. The ministry also went on to sign several agreements with labor exporting countries, which essentially contradicted this legislation, they claimed.
They also accused the Labor Ministry of causing the delay in the arrival of Filipino domestic workers, but then fining recruitment firms SR30 a day for each worker that has not arrived. They called on the ministry to cancel these fines.
They claimed that the ministry had violated Article 33 of the country's labor legislation, which states that the Ministries of Interior, Social Affairs and Labor should amend these laws. They alleged that the Labor Ministry had amended legislation without consulting the other two ministries.
Participants urged recruitment firms to change their worker contracts to take into account the country's new laws. They admitted that some firms had made serious mistakes, including selling the visas of domestic workers.