Filipinos ‘most preferred’ as Bahrain resumes hiring of domestic workers – DOLE

MANILA, Philippines — The government of Bahrain has resumed the recruitment of domestic workers following a six-month suspension, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) said Tuesday.

In a statement, DOLE said Bahrain’s Labor Market Regulatory Authority (LMRA) has lifted the temporary suspension on the recruitment of domestic workers, which was imposed last March in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a report to Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III, the Philippine Overseas Labor Office in Bahrain also said that most employers in Bahrain preferred Filipino workers in reopening their doors to migrant workers.

According to DOLE, LMRA’s preventive inspection director Ahmed Junaid said that random interviews among employers in Bahrain showed that Filipino workers emerged as “most preferred” among migrant workers from other countries.

Meanwhile, POLO noted that LRMA has warned would-be employers to refrain from engaging the services of unlicensed domestic expatriate employees employment offices (DEEEOs) in hiring domestic workers “to ensure that mitigation measures against the spread of COVID-19 are strictly followed and workers’ rights are upheld and protected.”

DOLE said this warning comes after 61 manpower agencies were recently questioned in a series of raids jointly conducted by LMRA and Bahrain’s interior ministry.

The said agencies, DOLE added, were found to have been “operating without a license and were hiring run-away domestic workers of various nationalities, to provide hourly cleaning services.”

The department said that the number of Filipino domestic workers in Bahrain dropped to only 16,576 Filipino domestic as of June 2020 compared to the 18,663 in 2019. [ac]