Govt moves to employ more citizens, limit expat numbers

99,500 work permits issued to expats, 38,500 cancelled in 2018

KUWAIT: The Manpower and Government Restructuring Program’s deputy director for national labor affairs Iman Al-Ansari announced that the program managed to employ 4,775 citizens in the private sector during the first quarter of this year, adding that a new bill has been submitted to the Cabinet requesting increasing the mandatory percentage of citizens in the private sector to create over 10,000 jobs during 2018-2019.

Deputy chairman of the Manpower Authority for expat labor affairs Hassan Al-Khadher said 99,508 work permits have been issued since the start of the year, adding 38,442 work permits were permanently cancelled. He said his department has cancelled tens of thousands of invalid work permits after making sure about the data with the interior ministry. He said the action taken is based on the rules of issuing work permits that allow automatic cancellation if six months elapse while the worker is outside Kuwait.

In an effort to make more citizens work for the private sector, the government plans to conduct a survey about ‘temporary jobs’ in Kuwait with the aim of remapping the local labor market in the foreseeable future. Informed sources said the Supreme Council for Planning and Development offered a new tender for bidding to consultancy firms requesting the preparation of a full study, survey and data lists about temporary jobs in the market so that expats in those jobs could be replaced by citizens.

The sources added that such a measure will help the government employ around 17,000 citizens in the private sector, especially since latest Civil Service Commission statistics show that around 13,500 citizens are unemployed. Notably, CSC statistics also show that 72 percent of government employees are citizens and 28 percent expats, while 96 percent of private sector employees are non-Kuwaitis versus only four percent citizens.

Meanwhile, Minister of Commerce and Industry Khaled Al-Roudhan urged all bodies subjected to the

ministry to provide him with a schedule for replacing expats with citizens. Informed sources added that according to CSC’s plans on replacing expats with citizens, the ultimate goal is for citizens to reach 100 percent of the total workforce in administrative, media, PR, IT, development, follow-up and statistics jobs within

five years, 95 percent in scientific, financial, economic and commercial jobs and 80 percent in craft jobs.

The National Assembly’s employment committee yesterday failed to meet for a lack of quorum to study the issue of growing unemployment among Kuwaitis and prepare its final report to the Assembly on the issue. The committee was formed with the main aim of pressing the government to create jobs for nationals, mainly by dismissing expatriates in public sector jobs and offering incentives to nationals to seek jobs in the private sector. MP Mohammad Al-Dallal yesterday called for the need to check the growing numbers of certain expatriate communities, especially the Egyptian and the Filipino communities.