Saudi Arabia: Women can work as maids in Saudi households

JEDDAH — Arab and Saudi women can work as maids in Saudi households and the Ministry of Labour could not interfere if Saudi women, due to difficult financial conditions, wished to work as cleaners and cooks in people’s homes.

Labour Minister Ghazi Al Gosaibi on Sunday criticised people who reject the idea of Arab and Saudi women working as maids in Saudi households. “We are a society which is full of guardians,” Al Gosaibi told reporters in Riyadh while answering a question about a proposal to have Egyptian housemaids in Saudi homes, as suggested by the Egyptian Minister of Labour.

Al Gosaibi said Saudis sponsor over 1.5 million foreign maids, the majority from Southeast Asia. Even though the issue of needy Saudi women working in Saudi households was brought to the ministry’s attention in the past, conservative elements in society rejected the idea.

“I see that any job, whatever it may be, is an agreement between an employer and the employee. It is a matter of accepting and refusing. If there is a woman whose circumstances force her to work in a kitchen for a few hours and she accepts the payment, then I cannot come and say, ‘How could Saudi women take such jobs?’ Our mothers and grandmothers used to do such jobs. And they still do in the Bedouin culture,” he said.

“The ministry or any other concerned authority has no business if a woman is satisfied with her payment. And I have no right to say that a Saudi woman should not be dubbed a ‘housemaid’,” Al Gosaibi said. He said the Ministry of Labour would not intervene if labour exporting countries chose to raise the wages of their nationals coming to work in the kingdom.

“It is not my business to interfere if a country decides to raise the price of recruitment. I cannot simply threaten to ban them. This is not ethically, legally, or civilly acceptable,” he said, and added that people can simply hire cheaper labour from other countries.

By Habib Shaikh, Khaleej Times