JEDDAH, 17 April 2006 — It may be time for young Saudis who lament the lack of jobs to take a good look around and learn a lesson from foreign workers who seem to be busy and working all the time.
Al-Riyadh daily pointed out that while many young Saudis complain about the lack of opportunities for employment and consider their plight sitting in coffee shops before returning to their parents’ homes to watch television late into the night and then sleep late into the morning hours, many young foreign workers are rising early, perhaps washing a car or two before laboring all day at a job and cleaning a house or two before calling it quits — no coffee house, no television and no late nights.
Even if the foreign worker loses his job, he keeps busy, perhaps selling bottles of water at a busy intersection on a hot, summer day or selling car accessories, toys or flowers.
The difference is, the foreign worker doesn’t have anyone to support him other than himself, and the foreign worker came here to make money. He doesn’t wear a finely tailored thobe and gutra purchased by his parents; he doesn’t have the keys to a family car and a father to loan him gas money, and he doesn’t have the attitude that the world owes him a living.
The irony is that a few short decades ago, Saudis were among the hardest working people in the world, capable of enduring harsh conditions that others couldn’t. Men preserved their culture by providing for their families, and women stayed home to care for the children without nannies or cooks or drivers. Young men would help their fathers with their work before starting families of their own. Air conditioning was nonexistent, and good clothes were reserved for special occasions.
Then oil wealth came along, and some people got the idea that work was for somebody else. Now we have a society in which many young men have never worked a day in their lives and many young women would have to give it some thought before making a pot of tea. Of course, the cook can make a pot of tea, and the driver keeps busy shuttling family members here and there as young men await a call from someone in need of a manager, coffee drinker, mobile-phone user or television watcher.
Although some lump all young Saudis in this category, nothing could be further from the truth. Go to any university or training facility and you will meet young Saudis acquiring the skills they need for success. Whether they’re learning to write software programs or teach English or learning how to safely assemble scaffolding or to weld, they’re all on their way to making valuable contributions to the Kingdom. There are always jobs available for people with needed skills. There are jobs available for the unskilled, as well, provided that the job-seekers are willing to hunt down the jobs and are ready to work hard when they find one.
A tipping point in the economic reforms that the Kingdom is undertaking will be when there is no longer a dual labor market, when wages paid for a job are the same for a foreign worker as they are for a Saudi. In the West, plumbers — the men who fix sinks and toilets — make more money than many people with college degrees, and the men who do those repairs are citizens of the countries in which they reside — not lower paid foreign workers.
If you look at Saudi business today, you see successful leaders who worked hard in family businesses under their fathers or took menial jobs to help their families. As they grew older, their expertise increased so that when they became managers, they knew the requirements and challenges of the employees they managed from firsthand experience. They did not feel that a business or an industry or the Kingdom owed them a living.
A recent report in Al-Riyadh newspaper related the story of a grandfather who told the grandson sitting next to him in the fruit market to try to buy and sell some fruit to make money instead of sitting around doing nothing. The grandson objected and asked his elder if he was serious. The young man insisted he would never take a low standard job and that he would rather stay unemployed with dignity.
Both of them laughed. The grandfather laughed about the boy’s ignorance regarding the concepts of dignity and success. The young man laughed at the old man’s idea, imagining that he would get a comfortable job with a nice desk and chair, wearing the finest thobe, gutra and igal his parents’ money can buy. He didn’t want to get involved in a day job or a night job that involves loading or offloading products because that might prove to be annoying.
A young girl in an Eastern Province elementary school was asked to write an essay about being poor. It started out “My family was so poor that our driver didn’t even have shoes.”
And after the sunset prayer, you see the foreign workers lining up outside the currency exchanges to send their hard-earned money back to Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, India and a half a dozen other countries. The money goes to take care of families; it may be funding a brother or an uncle in a business back home and building a future with hard work and sweat in clothing that might not be appropriate to greet a sheikh or sultan at a formal dinner.
At the same time, you see the immaculately dressed, unemployed young Saudis driving baba’s car to the coffee house and plunking down one of baba’s hard-earned SR10 notes as they complain to their friends about there not being any work.
