Higher Pay for Lankan Maids From Tomorrow

Sri Lankan maids in Saudi Arabia will have their minimum wage increased by over 90 percent starting tomorrow following a recent order issued by the Sri Lankan government. Maids will now receive a minimum of SR750 per month, a SR350 increase over their previous SR400 monthly wage."

Since Dec. 25, we have been advising recruitment agents in Saudi Arabia of the increase in salaries and telling them to revise contracts accordingly, " said N.L.D. Abeyrabne, counselor of Employment and Welfare at the Sri Lankan Embassy in Riyadh.Abeyrabne added that Sri Lankan maids currently working in the Kingdom would have their employment contracts adjusted to reflect the pay raise.Meanwhile, officials at recruitment offices in Riyadh and Jeddah said they had been adjusting contracts to reflect the pay raise.

"Since receiving the news of the announcement concerning the salary increase of Sri Lankan housemaids, we have had our workload doubled," said a source at Al-Babtain Recruitment Agency in Riyadh.The source added that it was a similar situation previously when the salaries of maids of other nationalities were increased.In the past two years, Filipino maids have had their salaries increased from SR800 to SR1,400, and Indonesian maids have had their salaries raised from SR600 to SR800.

The Kingdom also recruits domestic helpers from Vietnam and Nepal, whose minimum wage has been increased from SR400 to SR600 a month.However, with high inflation and increasing cost of living throughout the region, many citizens find the salary increases unacceptable. "I don't dispute that these workers need a pay raise but I feel that before the government gives domestic workers an increase in salaries, citizens should be helped in some way through subsidies or other incentives," said Abdul Rahman Al-Hashmi, a Saudi private sector worker.On the other hand, the decision to increase salaries is a dream come true for workers, who have been striving to save money to make ends meet for their families back home and get out of the cycle of poverty.

"I feel that the pay raise was long over due," said Sari N., a Sri Lankan maid who has been working in the Kingdom for 11 years. She added that she had gone home and returned to the same family five times."The family I work for has been very kind to me over the years and I've managed to save enough money to start a catering business in Sri Lanka. The pay raise means this will be the last time that I will be employed as a domestic worker. Now I can focus on being a business owner back home," she said.

Comments

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s. During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization. Even though NU was one of the ...

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy. But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...

INDONESIA A NEWS

Search This Blog