According to recent statistics released by the Ministry of Labor, more than 40 percent of vacant jobs in the private sector are reserved for Saudis. The problem is no one seems interested in applying to fill any of those jobs. What the ministry wants to tell us is that there are indeed a lot of jobs but Saudis are not willing to apply for them, and that job seekers are not reporting to labor offices to be employed.
From the ministry’s perspective, the impression is that the private sector is innocent of all accusations that it is not doing enough to employ Saudis. The proof is that the sector offered more than 82,000 jobs on golden plates to Saudis but more than 40 percent of the vacant jobs were not filled because job-seekers declined to come forward.
My advise to reporters, columnists and cartoonists who keep bombarding us with news, articles and caricatures about unemployment is that they should change their attitude. There is no such thing as a scarcity of jobs. The private sector has done its best to provide work for the citizens of this country but the blame lies with the Saudi job seekers themselves.
By now every one should have known that all those Saudis who knock at the doors of labor offices across the country every day carrying their credentials and wanting to apply for jobs, as well as the others who seek work in the foreign-dominated retail business, are not serious about finding work. They should realize that there is nothing called unemployment and that the expression only exists in the mind of newspaper writers and caricaturists.
Reality, however, tells otherwise. There is unemployment because the figures tell us that 88 percent of all workers employed in the private sector are foreigners, out of a total non-Saudi workforce of five and half million. This makes the 40 percent figure of available jobs pale before the staggering number of 5.5 million jobs occupied by non-Saudis.
In any job nationalization plan, the number of vacant jobs should at least be half the total number of foreign workers for the plan to be able to realize a degree of balance. That means the number of vacant jobs offered by the job nationalization plan should be two million at the minimum.
I am afraid the vacant jobs that the ministry was talking about were of the kind reserved for security guards and watchmen who work for 12 hours a day and get a mere SR1,200 a month.
The ministry absolved the private sector of any wrongdoing, although foreign workers continue to dominate private businesses. In any company or private establishment you would find that foreign workers dominate these firms, from department heads down to janitors.
Whom do we believe here? Reality, which tells us that there are 5.5 million foreign workers in the private sector, or the statistics released by the ministry? This is a question that only the ministry can answer.
