Employment on Business Visa in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is the largest employer of expatriate workers in the GCC countries and Middle east. By law, all expatriate workers are required to have work permits before they can start working in Saudi Arabia.

However, most companies invite their new hired employees to Saudi Arabia on a 1-3 month business visa and they are forced to illegaly work for their employers by the time their work permits are issued. A work permit can take any time between 2-9 months depending on the availability of visa quota for that company.

There have been incidents when these illegal workers were found out by Passport authorities and were immediately deported from the Kingdom. One such incident happened with a multinational automobile company in Riyadh last year when three of their senior managers including one Director of sales were arrested and deported from KSA. In April this year, a few managers including a supply chain director from a Riyadh based German FMCG were arrested from the company premises in Riyadh industrial city and were deported from Kingdom immediately. A state based telecom company's three employees were staying in the KSA for as long as a year without a work permit and were deported last month only.

The objective of this petition is to discourage companies from bringing employees to KSA on a business visa and then force them to work. And if a case is found out, the company itself should be penalized instead of the employees. Please forward this to as many people as possible and include more such incidents from your own experience in the comments section.