Most Saudis who have ever hired a housekeeper from a foreign country understand the bureaucratic procedures involved in obtaining proper documentation and paying the appropriate fees to bring someone into the country.

We must go through a recruitment agency, secure and pay for a visa, pay the recruitment agency or broker, make a personal appearance at the Jawazat (passport department) to obtain the worker’s Iqama and often deal indirectly with the employee’s home country’s rules and regulations. At the end of the process, private employers can pay upward of SR30,000 to hire a competent housekeeper or nanny.

Then we have the major employers: Restaurants, construction companies and just about any small, medium or large company that must hire multiple foreign workers. The expense is enormous. Multiply the SR20,000 spent to hire a domestic by 100 or even 200 and you can imagine just how much money employers spend to keep their companies running with foreign help. It’s not just the SR 200,000 to bring workers to Saudi Arabia, but also housing, health insurance and associated costs that can make any company CEO think twice about his annual expenditures in labor.

An estimated 30 percent of the Kingdom’s population is foreigner and remittances from foreign labor account for about six percent of Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product of $927.8 billion, according to available statistics. Employing foreign workers is not only vital to Saudi Arabia’s economy but also to the worker’s home country.

Saudis recognize that we are dependent on foreign labor to keep the country running. Without foreign labor we would be in a heck of a mess. We also recognize the high cost of foreign labor, and that for a company to succeed it must spend its labor dollars wisely.

That’s why it’s puzzling to see businesses waste money by the truckloads, not to mention waste the time of its employees who are far from home. The other day I ran into an acquaintance who is employed at a Jeddah restaurant. He is an Asian expat and has been in Saudi Arabia only for about a year. He told me his one-year contract was about to expire and he was returning home because he could not afford to live here. He had signed an employment contract as a mid-level manager with the company that owns the restaurant with an agreement that he would work 30 hours a week. He left his home and family for the job.

Over the course of a year, he saw his working hours steadily dwindle from 30 to 20 and often to 10 hours a week. This is hardly a working wage, and without a doubt impossible to live on in a city like Jeddah. Admittedly this is only anecdotal evidence of waste in the private sector, but it’s a clear example how a company fails to use common sense in getting a return on its investment after hiring this worker at great expense.

There could be many factors involved in his work schedule reduction that I am unaware. He could be a poor worker, although that is unlikely, or business is poor. But again that is unlikely since the restaurant has been in business for many years and is one of the most popular in Jeddah.

It’s also possible that more working hours are given to Saudi employees, thus taking away hours from my acquaintance. But I have not seen any evidence of Saudis employed at the restaurant. The issue here is that the Ministry of Labor requires that every expat must be gainfully employed to have legal residency. Yet there seems to be little control over the underemployed, which are those individuals working on the margins of expat work force. They are present on paper, but in reality do not work enough hours to justify their residency in the country.

It’s not the fault of the worker. In fact, it creates a great strain on the employee who has barely enough money to live on and certainly not enough funds to send home to his family. This is poor business practice on the employer’s part because it’s not getting a return on its initial investment and it’s adversely affecting the company’s overhead.

The restaurant in question will likely survive with its reduced profit margin since it remains a popular venue. But there are many other businesses with slimmer profit margins, higher overhead with poorer management skills that will go under due to waste and neglect. This not only affects the economy of Saudi Arabia with lost jobs for Saudis but lost remittances from foreign workers to the home countries.