At the Third Employment and Saudization Conference recently held in Riyadh, among the recommendations was one that called for the need to introduce work ethics as a subject in the education curriculum.
The conference also felt it should be included in the labor law. These recommendations may shock many people, especially since they suggest the presence of a serious problem in the country.
Work ethics is certainly a great need here; few people have any idea what the words mean or how necessary they are. It is a good idea to teach them and to include them in the law. It may be late in the day to take this step but that says a great deal about an ailing system that needs much more than recommendations to fix.
The recommendations concerning work ethics become a pressing necessity if seen in the light of a recent study done by the Institute of Public Administration about the civil service.
The study pointed out that some 69 percent of Saudi civil servants do not go to work regularly. Some 54 percent come to work late, and employees with masters and doctor’s degrees arrive as much as three hours late while those with secondary school certificates or less ordinarily arrive 42 minutes late.
In addition, many employees in the health sector leave work early, and 47 percent said that supervisors do not make their rounds. Every day we see and hear more and more such stories.
I have personally heard of employees who are always on leave; others get their colleagues to sign in for them with more influential officials not even bothering to cover up — they just create their own rules.
Respondents to the study said that the Supervision and Investigation Authority was not doing enough to prevent civil servants from neglecting their duties. But is everything that is done here done only because it is being supervised? Is nothing done simply because it is what should be done?
The study goes on with the results pointing directly at one single — and not very encouraging — fact: we are lucky that any work at all gets done, given the situation.
No doubt then that work ethics is lacking here — though I am sure that many have simply never heard of such a thing or imagined that such a thing might exist.
If we have to introduce work ethics into the labor law, that means we are in for big problems. Can you force honesty, dedication and a simple sense of responsibility by law onto civil servants?
What about the loss of those same ethics outside the work place? After all if a person is irresponsible at work, his daily dealings outside work will likely show a similar level of irresponsibility.
Are we going to make the law applicable to people in their social lives? Can we compel them by law to teach their children what they themselves lack? Looking at the study, it is striking that those with the highest degrees are the worst offenders.
Does that say something to us? It seems to imply that not only is our civil service lacking in work ethics but so also is our educational system, which fails to inculcate any sense of responsibility in students.
And students of course absorb what ethics they have from teachers and family — so the circle is self-perpetuating and never-ending.
Maybe the time has come for a deeper study of how Saudi society functions. Its findings might be unpopular, but if they spurred us to begin making even the tiniest improvements, they would have to be counted a success.
