Arab News 

JEDDAH, May 18: The Ministry of Labor has completed a five-year study of the current sponsorship system. The plan behind the study is to replace the sponsorship of individual workers with a new system of private recruitment companies which will take care of the affairs of individual expatriate workers.

While the precise time the new system will come into effect is unclear, the changes will only apply to workers with minimum qualifications such as laborers, drivers, housemaids and private female nurses.

According to the system recommended by the study, recruitment companies, instead of Saudi individuals, will recruit individual foreign workers, return them to their native countries at the end of their contract or before if they so desire. The company will also provide employment opportunities to workers or allow them to change jobs if the change is within the provisions of the relevant regulations, an informed source told Arab News.
The current sponsorship system, which has come under fire from various human rights groups, allows unscrupulous sponsors to abuse the rights of foreign workers and cause them many problems.

The system has received considerable public attention particularly since the Kingdom of Bahrain recently decided to scrap its sponsorship system. The system has been followed in the Gulf for over 50 years and was primarily designed to hold the sponsor responsible for people working for him and it obliged him to bring those under his sponsorship to the authorities in case of a criminal violation.

The system has been followed without alteration despite changes made to international labor regulations and concepts of human rights during the past five decades.

However, there are people who feel the proposed move does not go far enough as it will only affect jobs that do not need specialized skills. On the other hand, a number of officials at the consulates of countries, which send such workers to the Kingdom, welcome the move as it would solve the problems of a large number of expatriate workers. Commenting on the proposed system, Aishah Abdul Hadi, Egyptian minister for overseas workers, said she had called on Saudi authorities to set up a company to recruit foreign workers and guarantee their regular payments and other rights during her visit to the Kingdom a month ago.

Hoping the proposed system will yield positive results, an expert in human resources at Al-Sajini Consultancy Office said the proposed recruitment companies should be joint stock companies with a representative of the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) as one of its board members in order to guarantee that no workers' rights are violated.

However, some rights activists fear that the new move will only be a change in form without effective changes in content. Last year, the NSHR presented a proposal to the authorities for the repeal of the sponsorship system and its replacement with a government commission to look after guest workers.

The rights body also proposed a mandatory insurance scheme to protect the rights of employers and workers. It took four years for the organization to prepare the study in the light of international experiments.
Hussein Al-Shareef, supervisor of the NSHR in the Makkah province, told Arab News that he had requested the authorities to pay close attention to the proposals by the NSHR as they had been prepared after studying all aspects of the system.

"The negative aspects of the present Saudi sponsorship system malign the image of the country internationally and in addition, cause many problems for the six million foreign workers coming from 120 countries," he said.