July 16, Colombo: Over 100 Sri Lankan migrant workers who were in a detention centre in Jeddah returned to the homeland yesterday. They had to return due to reasons such as no employment, non-payment of salaries and harassment at work places.
The majority of them were women who worked as housemaids for small salaries.
Most of the returned workers were from outstations and some of them had no money to go back to the villages. Sri Lanka Foreign Employment Bureau had to pay the travel fare for 68 individuals to go to villages, a Bureau official said.
The money sent home by Sri Lankans employed abroad rose by 12.4 per cent to US$ 648 million dollars in the first quarter of this year. Over a million Sri Lankans are employed abroad, the majority of them housemaids in Gulf countries.
