With issues surrounding the growing presence of expat communities in Kuwait, which directly affect the labour landscape in the Gulf State, potential employees are looking elsewhere for work, with the assumption that the government no longer accepts expat workers from large expat communities in the country.
And as the government’s nationalization scheme is still pushing hard in all labour sectors, there is certainly this angle which expat workers look into when considering work in the Middle East, or in Kuwait, for that matter.
Authority Says Labour Recruitment Not Based on Nationalities, Numbers
To shed light on this situation, the Director General of the Public Authority for Manpower Ahmad Al-Mousa explained that bringing in expat labor is subject to rules mentioned in labor law 6/2010 and its decisions, as shared in a report by the Kuwait Times.
Mousa also pointed out that the authority carries out its responsibilities to issue work permits based on employers’ requests according to rules that are not related to the nationality or number of expat labour.
The director general cited the labor law and the law establishing the authority 109/2013 which gave it the right to bring in labor based on employers’ requests.
Regarding the the population structure’s imbalance, Mousa shared that the higher committee is dealing with this based on the decision of the state minister for economic affairs of 2/2019, and the teams formed for this purpose are hard at work at seeing this through.
Mousa said that this matter requires general awareness by employers and government departments that need workers to complete government projects.
It can be recalled that a number of MPs have called upon the government in recent years to take action in order to curb the government’s demographic imbalance, including calls to limit the recruitment of labourers from countries that have large populations in Kuwait.
The series of initiatives launched by the Kuwaiti government is aimed at addressing the population imbalance among expat communities in the Gulf State.
However, as it stands, employers still have the last say as to which expat populations are preferred for job orders in the country.
This can pose confusion particularly for expats interested to work and remain in the Gulf State, provided that they are legally capable and allowed to do so, because the government may be taking a different stand on certain expat communities in the country, but will ultimately depend on the discretion of employers and companies running the state’s economy in the background.
ALSO READ: Govt’s Proposal Aims to Force Expats to Leave to Receive Indemnity