Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development (MHRSD) has recently signed labour agreements to recruit private sector workers and domestic workers from Sierra Leone - Opens in new tab and Thailand - Opens in new tab. The Saudi Federation of Chambers estimates - Opens in new tab that the country will recruit around 200,000 Thai workers annually.
According to the Saudi Press Agency - Opens in new tab and Okaz - Opens in new tab, the two agreements aim to create a legal framework for all procedures required for the “effective employment” of Thai and Sierra Leonean workers in Saudi Arabia, including protecting the rights of both the worker and the employer, regulating the contractual relationship between them, and establishing mechanisms for the agreements’ follow-up and joint implementation.
The Shura Council has also recently approved - Opens in new tab a similar agreement with Burundi regarding the recruitment of domestic workers, which was signed last October - Opens in new tab by the two countries.
Similar bilateral agreements have been signed between Saudi Arabia and countries of origin in the past, but have not succeeded in safeguarding the rights of migrant workers. These new agreements have been approved in the wake of steep rise in the costs of recruiting domestic - Opens in new tab workers, which is largely attributed to the suspension of new recruitment by the Philippines and Indonesia, as well as the slowdown in recruitment from Kenya and Uganda - Opens in new tab.
In November 2021 - Opens in new tab, Philippines Labour Secretary Silvestre Bello banned new deployment of domestic workers to pressure the Saudi government to better protect the rights of Filipino workers in the Kingdom. Last year - Opens in new tab, Kenya's Ministry of Foreign Affairs proposed a temporary suspension on domestic worker recruitment, citing the severe deterioration in working conditions and suspicious deaths of Kenyan domestic workers in the Kingdom.
Saudi Arabia's recent labour and immigration reforms explicitly exclude the country’s estimated 3.26 million - Opens in new tabmigrant domestic workers. Domestic workers are regulated by a separate, bare-bones decree, and are among the least protected groups in the country.
Rather than working with origin countries who have imposed bans to address protection gaps, Saudi Arabia is leading a race to the bottom by signing agreements to meet domestic labour demands in the face of dwindling supply.
While Saudi's Musaned system purports to streamline DW recruitment, and does, to a degree, increase transparency in the chain of recruitment, it is not a mechanism for holding abusive or contract-violating employers accountable. The Saudi government must safeguard rights for domestic workers, adequately regulate their working conditions, and include them in the labour law.
