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DUBAI: With foreign workers accounting for the vast majority of private-sector jobs in the United Arab Emirates, the Gulf’s second-largest economy is looking to increase opportunities for its citizens.
Like other oil-rich Arab Gulf states, the UAE often uses the public sector as an employment vehicle for its nationals. But times are changing, said Khalifa al-Suwaidi, a 34-year-old Emirati researcher who himself has been looking for a job in the private sector since resigning from government in June.
“We have reached a point where there is diversity among Emiratis in terms of skill sets and expertise,” Suwaidi said. “The public sector can no longer accommodate many of these talents”.
Only 12% of the country’s more than 9 million residents are Emirati nationals, and more than 90% of private sector jobs are held by foreigners, according to the International Labor Organization.
Suwaidi, the author of a forthcoming book titled “UAE after the Arab Spring,” said he believed some employers ignored his application because they thought Emiratis would demand the usual pay for lucrative government jobs. high wages.
“The private sector needs to be more accommodating,” he said. “I’ve been applying for jobs for a while now, to no avail.”
The government is now making a big push for private companies to hire local talent, with the aim of ensuring that Emiratis make up 10 percent of the private sector workforce by 2026.
Next month, companies with more than 50 employees will face fines if they fail to fill 2% of their tech jobs with Emiratis.
That sparked a hiring spree, with recruiters noting companies “flooded with job vacancies” — many of which fell short of their targets.
“It’s going to be a tough game,” said Hamza Zaouali, founder of recruitment agency Iris Executives, but noted that it was “impossible” for the UAE government to continue developing and recruiting.
“A more sustainable approach is to ensure that the economy continues to absorb, train and work with the UAE,” Zaouali said.
It’s part of a broader trend, said Eman Alhussein, a nonresident fellow at the Institute for the Arab Gulf States in Washington. She said the UAE was joining “a larger drive in the Gulf to change the dynamics of state-society relations” and keep citizens away from government jobs.
“Gulf countries want citizens to change their expectations, to give back to the country and to accept jobs that work longer hours, with potentially less pay,” Alhussein said. In November, Abdulrahman Al Awar, UAE Minister of Human Resources and Emiratisation, said that more than 14,000 Emiratis will enter the job market in 2022, with an average of 100 finding work every day.
The government also announced a wage support scheme, offering Emiratis in the private sector an additional subsidy of up to AED7,000 (US$1,900) if their monthly wages are below AED30,000. Emiratis do not have a national minimum wage, but in Sharjah, one of the country’s seven emirates, they are entitled to a minimum wage of Dh25,000 a month.
The UAE is a top regional hub for multinational companies and ranks among the 10 richest countries in the world in 2020, according to the United Nations.
Its per capita GDP will exceed $47,000 in 2022, higher than that of the United Kingdom and France, according to the International Monetary Fund.
It has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the Middle East, but data on the national unemployment rate in the UAE is not yet publicly available.
In Dubai, the country’s financial capital, the UAE’s unemployment rate rose from 2.5 percent in 2012 to 4.2 percent in 2019, according to the Dubai Statistics Centre.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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