YANBU, 6 January 2008 — The Yanbu Municipal Council has drawn up a plan to educate laborers on ethical values in an effort to contain the spate of thefts reported from various ongoing municipal projects.
Chairman Abdul Ali Al-Sheikh told Arab News yesterday that the municipal council decided to teach cleaning laborers, all of whom are guest workers in Saudi Arabia, the basics of honesty at the workplace besides warning them against the severe punishment for such crimes.
Over the recent weeks, the municipal guards and policemen detected 15 cases of the cable theft in which the laborers were involved.
“It has come to the notice of the municipality that copper wires have been disappearing from locations of municipal projects and work sites of large companies,” Al-Sheikh said.
He added that the laborers caused a lot of delay and harm to the utility programs launched by the municipality.
“For instance, we installed the cables for the electrification of some residential districts but after the nightfall the laborers stole a good part of the cables. Our people learned about the missing wires only at the time of the commissioning of the lines. In fact, we were put in an extremely embarrassing situation,” the chairman said.
He added that there were also instances of garbage bins disappearing from several streets and residential districts. The laborers sell them as scrap iron after breaking them into pieces, he said.
Besides appointing more guards at all its new projects, the municipality has adopted the strategy of installing cables at the last moment after the electricity department completes its preparations for the commissioning of the new line. When the cables are electrified the thieves are less likely to tamper with them.
It was reported a few days ago that security men at a leading company caught a number of laborers who were leaving the company premises carrying copper wires. They had hidden the wires under their clothes wound around their bodies, the report said.
Khaled Al-Fazzi, another member of the council, stressed the need for conducting programs to familiarize the laborers about the noble values of not being dishonest at the workplace.
Policemen regularly monitor workers to see if they are stealing from work sites. If they fail to produce valid documents establishing the purpose for which they were carrying the wires, they are arrested. Some of the arrested laborers confessed that they sold stolen copper wire for SR20 a kilo, he said.
Similar theft cases were reported from several parts of the Kingdom. Last year, Saudi Telecom Co. complained that large quantities of wires were missing from several of their projects at various places.
The Gulf region employs millions of imported guest workers from Asia, mostly for menial labor jobs, because locals aren’t willing or able to work for these low wages.
