This is in response to the statement made by the Ministry of Labor’s spokesman in the recent past. Hattab Al-Enezi said that companies having a workforce of less than 50 percent of Saudi nationals risk losing their foreign workers if they fail to pay SR 2,400 for each extra expatriate annually.
The spokesman clearly puts the onus on the companies that are not meeting the Saudization targets, thus asking them to pay the fee, not the expat workers. But I don’t know how it can be ensured that the companies will not pass this burden on expat workers?
Has the Labor Ministry thought to devise a mechanism to force the companies to pay this fee from their profits, not just pass on the fee to their workers or increase the cost of their services? Such a strategy needs to be worked out to avoid defeating the main purpose. Here I will refer to another step taken by the government in public interest but it couldn’t succeed. Sometime back all the restaurants were asked not to pass the service charge to customers (which was generally 10 percent of the bill). Restaurants chose to comply with the order but at their own conditions. Most of them increased the price of food by 10 percent. By doing this they were able to make up for the loss, if any. In short, a step that was taken to provide relief to the general public has inadvertently worked in favor of restaurant owners. We hope this expat fee will not end up draining the affected workers’ pockets. — Masood Khan, Jubail
Burden of expat fee
