As the country continues to face shortage of domestic workers, many citizens have been victimized by unscrupulous elements who have complained to the Public Authority of Manpower that some owners of domestic labor offices announced new contracts for female workers from the Philippines at discounted prices compared to the rest of the offices, taking advantage of them and when these offices failed to deliver on their promises hundreds of them ended up filing complaints with PAM and the later ended up closing some offices and revoking their licenses.
A local Arabic daily has learned that PAM is in no mood to tolerate such nonsense from some domestic labor offices after some citizens which soil the reputation of other law abiding offices.
Informed sources said the closure came when the offices did not respond to the request of the Department of Domestic Labor to visit PAM, so they were administratively closed for 3 months, and their licenses were canceled by the Ministry of Commerce.
The sources added that many complaints were registered against offices which took money from citizens to bring in a domestic worker at reduced prices, which they published through advertisements in the media, and it turned out that they had ended up in signing fictitious contracts.
The specialist in domestic labor affairs, Bassam Al-Shammari, has warned some labor recruiting offices against such manipulations in calling them ‘just a trap to loot citizens’.
Al-Shammari told the daily many offices have been deliberately, in the recent period, harming the reputation of other domestic workers recruiting offices through fraudulent operations.
However, the change and rise in the new contracts was concentrated in two nationalities mainly, the Indian and the Filipino. The daily gave following details on the employment of domestic workers for the past six months, saying 26.6 thousand workers came from the Philippines, 23,000 from India and 8 thousand from Sri Lanka — 67.4% of them women; and 61,000 first time workers.
