Saudi Arabia has decided to curb its reliance on foreign labourers and implement a slew of measures to tackle the problem of unemployment in the kingdom.
"The unemployment problem is a major challenge. It cannot be dealt with while the country's doors are open to hundreds of thousands of expatriates every year," Saudi Arabia's Labour Minister Ghazi Al-Gosaibi was quoted as saying by the Saudi Press Agency on Wednesday.
The minister called for stringent measures to cut the unemployment rate and for reducing the country's addiction to foreign labour saying, "We will implement 26 policies through 108 mechanisms in order to reduce unemployment in the short and long-terms."
Gosaibi attributed the problem to low qualifications of job seekers, incompatibility of their educational qualifications with job-market requirements, lack of readiness on the part of some private companies to apply 'Saudisation policies' and low salaries offered by private firms.
According to figures, the current rate of unemployment in the kingdom stands at 9.1 per cent for men and 26.3 per cent for women. Gosaibi said the number of recruitment visas issued annually has declined from 597,000 in 2002 to 353,000 last year.
Meanwhile, the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council has taken a serious note of the growing joblessness among its nationals.
At a meeting in
Abu Dhabi earlier this week, United Arab Emirates' Labour Minister Ali Bin Abdullah Al Ka'abi termed unemployment a 'time bomb' which needs to be defused through training of human resources.
Al Ka'abi, however, ruled out offering any security payments and said people should be trained better. "But unemployment security payment may encourage them to stay idle".
He also told a Gulf daily that the country plans to limit the stay of unskilled workers to a maximum period of six
years.
The GCC had earlier shelved the proposal to stipulate the staying of expatriate workers to six years, according to
Gulf News.
The new rule is likely to affect around two million workers, unskilled labourers and domestic help who will leave the country after completing six years but may return after two years.
Earlier, Majid Bin Mohsen Al Alawi, Bahrain's labour minister, told the inaugural session that growing numbers of foreign workers in the GCC countries would turn citizens in these countries into minorities, who would end up losing their right to self-determination.
The GCC ministers hoped that a unified GCC labour market would be set up to create more jobs for their nationals and cut the numbers of foreign workers.