- JEDDAH: The few women in Jeddah working as cashiers are still doing so, but they fear that government ambivalence to the idea of women working in the service industry won’t protect them from being fired without notice due to their employers succumbing to social pressure, especially considering an official fatwa last year condemning any job where a woman might interact with a male customer, coworker or manager.
Arab News visited several Jeddah supermarkets and stores that employ women as cashiers. The sales consultant supervising the employment of women cashiers in her company said that they have so far employed 35 Saudi women in five branches and are to open three more women sections in Jeddah.
The salaries of these women, she said, are SR3,000 a month. The women who are employed come through the Ministry of Labor.
Another major store that had started employing women last year recently stopped recruiting more women. An official at the company told Arab News that they are not willing to employ more women and are now working on restructuring the women’s sections in their company.
Media reports stated that there will be an official ban on women cashiers soon. The Council of Senior Islamic Scholars issued a fatwa last year calling for banning women from working as cashiers. The statement said that the mixing of sexes is forbidden and women should not seek jobs where they could encounter men.
Meanwhile Saudi filmmaker Hana’a Al-Fasi has launched a campaign entitled “Work is Worship!” which aims at supporting women who work as cashiers.
In the widely circulated YouTube clip, a Saudi father commends a young Saudi man who is working as a cashier, expressing his pride in seeing a Saudi willing to do an honest day’s work. Then the father sees a young Saudi woman working as a cashier at the same supermarket and loses his temper, lecturing her and urging her to quit and take a more honorable job where she doesn’t encounter unrelated men.
