The phenomenon of the shortage of domestic workers continues to increase in the local labor market, without the ability of the relevant government agencies to find radical solutions to stop the exacerbation of this shortage.
Entities related to domestic workers revealed a big number of this labor has seeped into the private sector, taking advantage of the severe shortage of craftsmen and professional workers that the local labor market suffers from, and the repercussions of the decision taken by the Public Authority for Manpower on the issue of renewing residence permits for non-graduate expatriates 60 years and above, a decision that has led to the departure of thousands of craftsmen and professional workers, which created a parallel market for domestic workers to fill this shortage, and this has caused countless problems for citizens and residents especially during Ramadan and with the approaching summer vacation, reports a local Arabic daily.
This is confirmed by the statistics issued by the concerned authorities, which indicate tens of thousands of workers from this category finding work in the private labor market although they are fully aware they are violators of labor and residence laws, but the money offered by the private sector, especially in the construction sector is risk worth taking because they can make a fast buck and leave the country when caught with no regrets, because some say their three or four-month salary as domestic worker is equivalent to one month’s paycheck in the private sector as a majority of them work on daily wages.
The daily said it discovered some owners of companies and offices recruiting domestic workers confirmed “the poor conditions of the labor market, in light of the continuing confusion experienced by the relevant government agencies, and the lack of coordination among them, and the resulting wrong decisions that complicate the problem and multiply the suffering of the labor market.”
For his part, a specialist in domestic labor affairs, Bassam Al-Shammari, confirms that the phenomenon of domestic labor infiltration into the private sector is exacerbating in an unprecedented manner, requiring urgent solutions to be found, and an effective treatment by the concerned government agencies so that things can be restored to their rightful place.
Al-Shammari told the daily “statistics issued by the Public Authority for Manpower indicate that about 60 percent of the menial labor work in violation of the residency and work laws, who are caught during field inspection campaigns and deported, a majority of whom are runaway household workers and work on a daily basis.
Al-Shammari attributed the reason for this to the migration of craftsmen and professional workers and the consequent severe shortage that the market is currently suffering from, which prompted business owners to create a parallel market through the use of domestic workers to fill this shortage, stressing that some government decisions are not prudent, especially the decision prohibition of renewing work permits for 60-year-olds with working secondary qualifications and below, which lasted for more than a year before it was amended, and thousands of craftsmen left the country, and this constituted a major reason behind the use of domestic workers in order to compensate for this shortage of professional and craft workers.
To add insult to injury, Al-Shammari said is the decision of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry not to allow domestic workers recruiting offices to charge more than 890 dinars to bring in domestic workers at a time when these offices complain of rising costs in the form of tickets and medical charges in labor exporting countries.
He said that “the government’s confusion and the issuance of inapplicable decisions regarding the recruitment of domestic workers and the determination of the estimated costs in return reveal a lack of understanding of the dimensions of the problem and the complete distance of the decision-makers from what is happening on the ground.” It has dire consequences for the domestic labor market.
Al-Shammari points out that the inability of the concerned government agencies, including the workforce, to achieve the required balance between decisions to address the imbalance that affected the demographic structure in the country and the lack of restrictions on bringing in new workers, as well as the failure to take steps and procedures far from the easy traditional solutions of prevention A major cause was also labor shortage.
He considered that the current policy in calculating the estimation of the need for labor is not commensurate with the nature of the work of recruitment offices that deal with several nationalities and need labor of each nationality capable of communicating with the recruited labor; whether from the Philippines or India and other labor exporting countries.
He stressed on the need to review and increase the mechanism for calculating domestic workers’ salaries, in order to attract skilled labor capable of upgrading the labor market, and to ensure that it does not infiltrate the private sector, to which the leaked labor earns many times the salaries of workers in the domestic sector.