JEDDAH — Astonished, bitter and downright angry are the words low-salary private sector employees are using to describe how they feel about being excluded from last month’s decision by the Shoura Council to raise the salaries of government workers.
Private sector employees, who say they simply cannot afford to remain silent on the issue any longer and demand that the government provide them with a financial break as well, have repeatedly scrutinized the decision, which came as part of a 17-point program to help ease woes felt by citizens from the increasing cost of living.
Government employees received a 15-percent pay raise earlier this year, and recently the government announced that an additional five percent would be added to help cover rising inflation. In both cases, only Saudis working for the government received these pay hikes.
Wejdan Ahmed, a Saudi receptionist working at Al-Zahira Clinic in Jeddah, which has been contracted by the Saudi Arabian Airlines Medical Center, said she feels that the pay hike excluding the private sector is discriminatory.
“My work shift is supposed to be eight hours a day but I am usually called in to work on weekends and Eid holidays without overtime compensation,” she said, adding that Al-Zahira is being paid by Saudia SR3,000 per employee, but her salary only amounts to SR1,500. “I feel that it is very important for the government to make a mandatory decision to raise the salaries of all nationals, not just government employees,” she said.
“I would like very much to get married and have a family but on my salary I am barely able to afford my expenses now,” said Faiz Al-Otaibi, a Saudi security guard in Makkah who dropped out of school to care for his ailing mother following her divorce some years ago. “With my salary only bringing in SR2,300 per month, how would I ever be able to afford the responsibility of a family,” he asked.
However, government employees argue that they deserve the pay hike because their wage scale was not revised for 20 years until 2005, when King Abdullah took the initiative to increase their salaries by 15 percent. “Civil servants should not only be chosen for pay raises but should be the first to get every kind of benefit that the government has to offer,” said Taher Maharan, a Saudi Navy officer. “We, as policemen and soldiers, are mostly involved in protecting the country. And we, as government employees, are responsible for keeping the country organized.”
Employees like Ramsey Khayat say that despite working for the same private company for nearly a decade he and his colleagues have never received any offer from their company to increase their pay since they began work. Lately it is becoming increasingly unbearable with skyrocketing consumer prices and cost of living.
“It is easy for civil employees who are getting incentives like pay hikes from the government to tell private sector workers to ask their companies for a raise but not all companies do that like the large-scale corporations,” Khayat added, referring to the recent inflation allowance that companies such as SABIC, Mobily and Savola have announced for their employees.
One reason many small to medium-sized companies are unable to increase workers’ salaries is that they themselves are facing the pinch of global inflation.
“We are barely breaking even and have been struggling to turn a profit,” said the owner of a local bakery, adding that the ingredients used to produce the pastry items sold in his shop has increased so much that he has been forced to raise consumer prices to keep his business afloat.
“When businesses are faced with these types of pressures how could they ever think of being able to increase employee salaries. The government is the only one who can put an end to the cycle of burden of the cost of living.”
