Marcos: Kuwait Crown Prince vows to fix labor relations with PH

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said Kuwait Crown Prince Sheikh Mishal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah was displeased with the current Philippine-Kuwaiti labor relations and vowed to fix the agreement between the two countries.

During a Saturday interview with the Philippine media on the sidelines of the ASEAN-GCC Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Marcos said the Kuwaiti monarch told him that the Philippines did not need to apologize for the situation.

Marcos added that the crown prince apologized to him, as he disagreed with what his people were doing.

“The words that he used, ‘Do not listen to them. I do not agree with what they have been doing.’ And, in fact, he said, ‘I do not want… There is no reason for you to apologize to us,’” Marcos said.

“‘We will fix it and we will make it because we love the Philippines,’” the President recounted, quoting the Kuwaiti Crown Prince.

On Saturday afternoon, Marcos said efforts at normalizing labor relations between the two countries ''have moved very quickly.''

''We agreed to continue to discuss some of the obstacles in our relationship in terms of the bans that we had imposed on employment. And he was very, very effusive in saying that we should remove all of those and we should continue as we had done before, which is a very important development because for a few months now, we have had to ban the deployment of Filipino workers in Kuwait,'' Marcos said in a speech following his arrival in Manila. 

''Now that will end, we will now return to the normal state of affairs with the Kuwaiti government. And in fact, they have moved very quickly. They have already started discussions at the ministerial level and at the ambassadorial level as well,'' he added.

Marcos said he considered the resolution of the Philippines’ disagreement with Kuwait as one of the successes of his trip to Saudi Arabia during the ASEAN-GCC Summit.

“Sinasabi ko nga sa ating mga kasamahan na just for that, worth it na itong byahe natin dahil naayos natin ‘yung problema sa Kuwait, which talagang sumasakit ang ulo namin kung papaano namin gagawin. But that is one of the shall we say, successes that we can record from this trip,” Marcos said.

(I am telling our colleagues that our trip was worth it because we fixed the problem with Kuwait, which was giving us a headache as to how we would fix it. But this was one of, shall we say, successes that we can record from this trip.)

Marcos had a bilateral meeting with the Crown Prince during the summit.

The Presidential Communications Office said the bilateral meeting was sought by the crown prince.

In May, Kuwait indefinitely suspended all new visas for Filipinos in an escalation of a row between the oil-rich Gulf state and Manila over worker protections and employer rights.

The visa suspension came after the Philippines in February stopped the first-time deployment of domestic workers to Kuwait after the body of domestic worker Jullebee Ranara was found in the Kuwaiti desert in January. — with Jiselle Anne Casucian/DVM/VBL, GMA Integrated News