Tue 04 August 2020:
Media reports on Tuesday stated “majority of government ministries” in Kuwait have begun to terminate expatriates working for them, particularly those in “non-technical” fields.
A source told Al Rai, “The process of terminating expats working in the governmental agencies will happen gradually and we will be notifying them to ensure that the work is not affected.”
More than 50 per cent of expats working for sub contractors, hired by governmental agencies, will likely be laid off in 3 months. As for those hired directly by the ministries, they have already been moved to companies that are subcontractors for governmental ministries.
The head of the parliamentary Human Resources Development Committee, MP Khalil Al Saleh, told Al Rai, “The committee has taken concrete steps to address the issue in the demographic imbalance. We will be holding a meeting next week to prepare a report, with data and statistics, that we will present to the National Assembly.”
The MP also added, “We have achieved what we agreed upon to solve the problem, especially since there are expats that are working in non-technical jobs in the governmental sector.”
Al Saleh stressed on closing the Kuwaitisation file that deals with expats working in non-technical jobs. He called on the Civil Services Commission to adhere to resolution 11/2017 that deals with achieving Kuwaitisation in the public sector, which would lead to 100 per cent of the public sector workforce being Kuwaiti.
Kuwaitisation, a governmental policy introduced in 2018, aims at shifting the workforce balance so that the majority of jobs are done by Kuwaitis, not expats. As of December 2019, there are 120,000 expats, out of the 3 million residing in Kuwait, working in the public sector. Back in 2018, around 50,000 expats working in governmental agencies were laid off.
Currently, 90 per cent of the 1.4 million Kuwaiti population works in the public sector.
In June, the Kuwaiti National Assembly introduced a quota bill to cut population of expatriates from the current percentage of 70 per cent of population to 30 per cent. According to the bill, Indians should not exceed 15 per cent of Kuwait’s population. This could result in 800,000 Indians leaving Kuwait, as the Indian community constitutes the largest expat community in the country, which has a total population of 4.3 million.
Kuwait is a top source of remittances for India. In 2018, India received nearly $4.8 billion from Kuwait as remittances.
