I RECENTLY received a call from Labor Minister Mufrej Al-Haqabani. During that telephone conversation he answered to my queries on recruitment of domestic servants in an organized and convincing manner. In a previous article I had written about the ministry's plan to open the recruitment market to foreign firms by allowing them to set up offices in the Kingdom. The move comes after Saudi families turned to GCC recruitment firms following the appearance of a black market in the Kingdom making recruitment of maids and drivers costly. The minister's answers were convincing to a great extent. However, I believe that there is room for improvement and hope the ministry would take further steps to develop the system. Al-Haqabani is not an outsider. He has been working in the ministry for quite a long time as undersecretary for planning and development before becoming the deputy minister and then the minister. He has acquired a huge wealth of administrative experience. However, the success of any ministry depends on the cooperation and support of other government departments. We are now in a new phase, which is the phase of a huge workshop involving all government departments and agencies, and even the private sector, which is part of this success story. The most striking thing the minister said during the conversation was the role of citizens in complicating the labor recruitment issue, which we often ignore. The ignorance of Saudis about labor rights has created big problems in a major labor exporting country to the extent that its government, under popular pressure to resign, intervened to quell public anger. For example, when the ministry allowed recruitment of maids from India, as a suitable alternative after Indonesia stopped sending domestic servants to the Kingdom, and then to other GCC countries, it asked the recruitment firms to bring Indian maids on condition of facilitating recruitment of other Indian workers required by Saudi companies and establishments. But soon after the hand of an Indian maid broke when she jumped down the window of her sponsor's house, the Indian government had to intervene to cool down sentiments. She took the drastic step after her sponsor prevented her from using a mobile phone. This resulted in the closure of the door of maid recruitment from India once again. Now the question is whether the recruitment problem lies in the ignorance of citizens and their disrespect to workers or the lack of a full-fledged law to regulate the relationship between employer and employee. Most maids run away because the door is open to work for others. The poor sponsors not only lose their services but also will not get any compensation for the money they spent to bring them to work in the country. We stop when the Indian streets protest but when thousands of Saudi sponsors lose their maids a few days after their arrival in the country nobody stages any protest. Have we become a racist society? This question arises from our treatment of Ethiopian maids — whose number by the way has crossed 200,000 — for being skinny and black. Most of them are not trained to work and some of them even don't know how to open the door of their sponsor's house. But this should not be a justification for us to treat them harshly. Islam has taught us to establish a relationship of kindness and mercy with servants. Of course, there are few cases of maids involving in violence, which was mainly because of psychological and behavioral problems. The Labor Ministry should take care of such cases in coordination with mental hospitals to bring those maids back to normal life and protect their health. Al-Haqabani deserves our appreciation for responding positively to the criticisms leveled against his ministry as he contacted personally to give clarification, expressing his desire for dialogue and accept the opposite view. At the same time, it is a fact that citizens are part of the recruitment problem while the untrained and runaway maids complicate the issue further.
