More than 98 Sri Lankan female housemaids including six children stranded in the Kingdom will soon be going home. The women and children were handed over to the authorities on Saturday for repatriation. The handover was arranged by the Consulate General of Sri Lanka after negotiations with the deportation authorities in Jeddah. The stranded workers will be repatriated once formalities are completed. The Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment provided air tickets for 42 stranded workers and the rest were borne by the workers themselves. Consul General of Sri Lanka Dr. Adambawa Uthumalebbe was present to personally oversee the operation. It was not clear how long each of the workers have been staying in the Kingdom. Meanwhile, the Saudi Ministry of Labor has recently announced the Kingdom's ban on domestic workers from Indonesia and Philippines was still in place in light of the two countries' “illogical” and costly recruitment demands. The Ministry and the two countries failed to reach agreement, and labor officials have already visited other countries to recruit domestic workers. In late 2010, a similar ban on Sri Lankan domestic workers had been in effect because the Sri Lankan Labor Union needed more time to convince local recruitment agencies to endorse an agreement that would have reduced recruitment fees from SR7,500 to SR5,500. Some Sri Lankan agencies have insisted that the said fee must not be reduced. The National Committee for Recruitment had then directed Saudi recruitment offices not to accept citizens' new applications for Sri Lankan maids until the issue was resolved. In mid-2011, some recruitment offices in the Eastern Province agreed to temporarily stop employing Sri Lankan housemaids as an act of protest against agents' attempts to raise the workers' salaries. Owners of the recruitment offices have said Sri Lankan recruitment agents were subverting official channels to raise maids' salaries from SR650 to SR800. But the owners reportedly did not submit to the pressure because they had other alternatives, including temporarily banning recruitment from Sri Lanka.
