Deputy Minister of Labor Ahmed Al-Humaidan will meet with owners of licensed recruitment offices on Jan. 12, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., to discuss ongoing recruitment issues.

Office owners received an e-mail and link from the ministry to register their information for the meeting, local media has reported.

According to Majed Al-Haqqas, spokesman for recruitment offices, the ministry does not wish to commit the same errors as before and it must negotiate and discuss with the offices.

It was recently reported that investors in recruitment agencies, especially those engaged with domestic workers, have claimed that 90 percent of them are almost paralyzed and blame the Ministry of Labor for the crisis.

One the reasons they cited is lack of clear instructions on the cost factor, terms of recruitment period, and the amount of money that a citizen should pay. Al-Haqqas said that in case no positive results are achieved during the meeting, the ministry will at least know the offices are not at fault.

About solutions, he said the ministry must cancel its latest decisions related to “limiting the time duration and costs of recruitment” through the Office of the Ombudsman, as well as issue new regulations for recruitment in coordination with the offices.

Sources confirmed that the meeting will cover five main areas, including the reaction to the Shoura Council’s recommendations that were recently submitted to the ministry regarding the recruitment of domestic workers from Gulf countries, and the views of recruitment offices about how to revive the process.

Recruitment offices requested discussing a partnership with the Ministry of Labor (MoL) to organize and issue regulations so as to ensure such regulations are realistic and achievable, as well as ways of solving the issue of the rights of workers and sponsors.

The ministry also seeks to discuss procedural and electronic steps related to receiving complaints from ministries and recent developments.

In a related development, 56,600 private sector employees sued their employers during 2014, the MoL confirmed.

In its annual report for 2014, the ministry revealed a total of 4,750 cases were filed by employees, of which the largest proportion, about 33.6 percent, were in Riyadh, and 15 percent were in Asir. The ministry said it resolved 3,607 cases concerning 47,000 employees so far.

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