“We beg to disagree with the assessment of Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz. We have been receiving reports of job termination while private companies have put on hold the hiring of expatriate workers, including Filipinos, here in Saudi Arabia,” John Leonard Monterona, Migrante-Middle East regional coordinator, told Arab News.
Under Nitaqat, employers that are not in compliance with Saudization quotas will have their ability to recruit foreign workers, or continue to employ the ones they have, curtailed.
Baldoz had earlier issued a press statement in Manila in which she said that the “new Saudization program should not be a cause for worry.”
“I have met with Labor Minister Adel Fakeih on the sidelines of the recent 100th ILO (International Labour Organization) Conference in Geneva, and he didn’t mention in our bilateral meeting anything about hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, including OFWs, getting displaced soon in the Saudi labor market,” she said.
Monterona said Nitaqat could affect 30 percent of the estimated 1.5 million Filipino migrant workers in the Kingdom, which translates to about 360,000 OFWs. He was quoting recruitment leaders in the Philippines as well as in Saudi Arabia.
Monterona added that even Filipino bank executives in major cities of the Kingdom are worried as foreign banks had already cut the number of their foreign workers by as much as half.
“I was also informed by Filipino engineers working for a consultancy firm in Dammam that about 18 of their co-workers, including OFWs, had been terminated. They attributed this to their company’s compliance with the Nitaqat program of the Saudi government,” he said.
He said that on Saturday Fakeih was quoted in local newspapers as saying that the Labor Ministry “was working on new rules and regulations aimed at phasing out unskilled foreign workers from the Kingdom and replace them with Saudis.”
With this announcement, Monterona added, even the unskilled construction, factory and farm workers are not spared from the effect of the Nitaqat system.
“Certainly, the Saudi shrinking labor market will be shaken up by the Nitaqat system whose aim is to employ about 500,000 jobless Saudis. All labor-exporting countries like the Philippines should ready their safety nets to lessen the impact on migrant workers,” he said.
