DUBAI: The Philippine government has temporarily halted the deployment of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to Saudi Arabia, in what the labor secretary said was “effective immediately and until further notice.” “The department received reports that departing OFWs are being required by their employers/foreign recruitment agencies to shoulder the costs of the health and safety protocol for COVID-19 and insurance coverage premium upon their entry in the Kingdom,” labor chief Silvestre Bello III said in his May 27 memorandum for the government’s main overseas labor deployment office. The labor department will resume deployment of OFWs after the matter has been clarified, Bello added in his memorandum. Existing travel regulations from the Kingdom’s civilian aviation authority requires that all international guests must complete a period of seven days of institutional quarantine at their own expense starting from the time of arrival. They must also take a PCR test on the seventh day of their arrival, and if the result is negative, they would be permitted to leave quarantine on the eight day. The announcement, posted on the social media account of the department’s labor office in Riyadh, received mixed reactions from OFWs based in the Kingdom, with some hoping that the temporary suspension be lifted soon. Philippine Overseas Employment Administration administrator Bernard Olalia in an interview on Friday said the quarantine protocols would be clarified since “OFWs must not bear the costs of the institutional quarantine and the PCR testing” but the foreign employers instead. Saudi Arabia is a major destination for Filipino workers in the Middle East, with about one million of them employed in the Kingdom sending about $1.8 billion in remittances back home.