Muscat: Free movement of workforce, especially migrants, would limit the ‘illegal market’ of workers in the GCC region, according to a senior official of the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
“Employees should be free to change their employment,” Beate Andrees, Head of Anti-Trafficking Programme at the ILO, told Gulf News Sunday in an exclusive interview at the end of a workshop on human trafficking in Muscat.
She also stressed that the expatriate workers should be able to change their employment within the country. “The migrant workers cannot afford to leave and come back therefore, they should be allowed to change employment within the country,” she said referring to law where an expatriate employee in Oman can leave the country and return on fresh employment contract with another sponsor.
“The system of sponsorship needs to be changed as well,” she said, suggesting that employers should not be given a say in sponsoring his employee.
“Binding a worker to a specific employer is not a good practice,” said Andrees.
She said that binding workers to specific employers is not cost-efficient. “With that practice [of binding workers to specific employer] you will lose skilled workers and breed quite a high number of irregular workers,” she opined.
In reply to a question, she praised Oman’s efforts to address the problem of human trafficking. “Oman’s government has shown will to address and recognise the problem of human trafficking,” she said, praising the Manpower Ministry’s effort to print awareness of rights leaflets in various language of South Asia and setting up a Hotline to help migrant workers.
However, she added, that she had seen problems in application of the will into action. “We are here to conduct workshops to raise awareness among the agencies that implement these decisions,” she revealed.
Oman, in June last, signed the Decent Work Country Programme with the ILO. “The objective of the programme is to improve the protection for migrant workers [expatriates],” she said.
At the same time, Andrees pointed out, under the programme ILO will help Oman’s Ministry Manpower in nationalising the workforce.
She agreed that the Manpower Ministry was doing their bit for the expatriate workers but wants them to do more to disseminate information of workers’ rights to the migrant employees in the country.
Ideally she said the ILO would like to see shelter and safe houses for the workers going through conflicts with their employers. “We are discussion with the Manpower Ministry to set up such cost effective shelters for workers in conflict.”
When asked if Oman had agreed to their request, she laughed and said: “We are still discussion but only local authorities can say of they have decided on that or not.”
She said there were about 229,000 people suffering from forced labour in the Middle East and 203,029 people were trafficked. “Globally, $31.7 billion is the estimate of total illicit profits produced in one year by trafficked forced labourers and in the Middle East it is $3.2 billion,” she revealed.
