GCC to act against Asian labour exporters

The private sector in Gulf oil producers has decided to pool efforts and create a joint team to face what it describes as bids by Asian labour-exporting countries to impose their conditions in sending workers to the region.

The team will be formed within a month and with group representatives of the private sector in the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which groups the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman.

“We will form this team within a month or so and will make recommendations to the GCC labour ministers,” said Saad Al Baddah, head of the labour recruitment committee in the Saudi chambers of commerce and industry.

“The aim of this team is to coordinate efforts among member states to help local employers in their efforts to hire labour and counter the conditions imposed by the Asian labour exporting countries,” Baddah said at a news conference in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Sunday, according to Saudi newspapers.

Baddah’s figures showed around 17 million foreigners, mainly Asians, work in the GCC, remitting nearly $81 billion to their home countries in 2014. India, he said, is the largest labour exporter to the GCC, accounting for nearly 33 per cent of the total.

A breakdown showed nine million expatriates live in Saudi Arabia, remitting nearly $35 billion while the UAE has about four million foreigners, with their remittances standing around $16bn. Foreign workers in Kuwait are estimated at 1.6 million with annual remittances of $12bn while they stood at about one million with remittances of $eight billion in Oman, 900,000 workers with cash transfers of nearly $7.5bn in Qatar, and around 400,000 workers with transfers of $2.5bn.

“We want to coordinate action and act as one entity in face of measures taken by the countries which supply domestic labour and other workers…in most cases, those countries do not recognise measures taken by the GCC to ensure good wages for their labour and surprise us by taking one-sided measures,” he said.

Baddah cited the recent decision by India to increase the minimum wages of its domestic workers sent to Saudi Arabia to SR1,500 a month.

“We have been weak in face of conditions imposed by those labour exporters…this picture will be quite different when we join hands and work together to guarantee the rights of the GCC citizen,” he said.

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