Revised visa hike in Saudi a stab on blue collar workers

Hyderabad: With the new revised visa fee recently announced by the Saudi Arabian Government the ‘working class’ or the ‘blue collar workers’ are to be effected the most.

Out of two million workers that moved from Telangana to Saudi Arabia for work, 85 percent of these workers fall under working class people or the blue class workers category.

Shaik Chand Pasha President of Gulf Return Welfare Members’ Society and also a Gulf-returnee says the increased visa fee will only trouble the workers class as the concerned companies will bear the expenses for the white collar workers.

“White collar workers, from supervisor rank employees to managers, engineers, senior engineers, and in a few cases, foremen, etc., are most essential for companies. So, they bear dependent visa charges for those employees. Companies give them free accommodation and free education for their children, companies even bear flight charges for them and their dependents to visit India once a year,” says Shaikh.

Since the company bears the visa expenses of these white collar employees, the new revised visa hike for dependents of Iqamah (work visa) holders will only burden the worker class.

According to the new hiked visa fee companies that have hired non-Saudi employees with half of its staff as Saudi national will have to pay SR 300 per family per month from the next year, SR 500 a month in 2019 and SR 700 a month in 2020 for all the dependent visas or Iqamah’s, whereas those companies whose staff are less than 50 per cent Saudi nationals will have to shell and extra SR 100 per month per family, DC reported.