Talal Al-Gashgari

Al-Madina newspaper

You may be aware that the monthly salary of the street cleaner in our country is not more than SR350. This is true for all cleaners in all cities and towns.



Out of this meager salary, the expatriate cleaner has to pay for his food and meet his other daily expenses in addition to sending some money to his family back home.



The cleaning companies claim that they provide their workers with free accommodation. This is true but a look at their accommodation will reveal that it is not only humble and cracking but also overcrowded. A large number of workers are put in a small room. This is not only inconvenient but it may cause them to suffocate.



You may know all this but the thing you do not know is the story told to me by one of the cleaners.



He said the company made it obligatory on him to purchase his air ticket to his home at his own expenses. The ticket fare is SR2,500. The company said it will deduce the ticket price from his monthly salary.



A simple calculation will reveal to us that after the deduction of the monthly installments to cover the ticket price the poor laborer is left only with SR142 as a monthly payment.



In my opinion this is the lowest salary in the entire world. When you take into consideration the high cost of living in big cities such as Riyadh or Jeddah, you find out that this is an hourly wage not a monthly salary.



It is not surprising in the case that many cleaners have turned into beggars cleaning by one hand and extending the other to the people to give them. They do this openly without fear or shame because their companies have impoverished them.



The cleaners do their begging right under the eye of the Jeddah municipality, which has signed contracts at billions of riyals with the cleaning companies to keep the city clean.



By paying very little salaries to their workers, the cleaning companies are making huge profits.



The municipality has never questioned the cleaning companies about the miserable conditions of their workers who are suffering greatly not from being away from home and their loved ones but also from the injustices inflicted on them by their employing companies.



The municipality did not even bother to ask these companies to improve the living conditions of the cleaners. This is not good for the reputation of our country on the regional or international arenas. I avail this opportunity to appeal to the Ministry of Labor to step in to put an end to these injustices after the municipality has given them a blind eye.



The ministry will not be happy to see this happening to any Saudi citizen abroad. So it should not accept it for the expatriates living in our country.