Labor minister:50 job centers to be set up for women soon

Labor Minister Adel Fakeih said on Monday his ministry plans to set up 50 job centers for Saudi women throughout the Kingdom to enable them to find employment opportunities in various sectors. The minister was making a keynote address during the afternoon session of the Sixth Global Competitiveness Forum that is being held in Riyadh. He said the government has embarked on a comprehensive program to empower women and help them find suitable placements both in the public and private sectors. “We have started with the program of employing local women in lingerie shops. Similarly, we have identified several other sectors where women can be deployed for employment,” Fakeih said, hoping the new openings for women would be announced shortly. In another development, the minister said plans are underway to monitor the percentage of salaries paid to Saudi employees in private sector companies. He explained that according to the Nitaqat program, companies should not only employ a required percentage of Saudis but also ensure a similar percentage of wages are paid to Saudi employees. “A company will not be allowed to hire several low-paid workers such as security guards just to increase the number of employees,” the minister said, stressing the same percentage of salaries should be paid to Saudi cadres. Such a program will be implemented soon with the cooperation of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) in the Kingdom, he noted. “The state of the world economy has continued to be uncertain, with an ongoing financial crisis in Europe and America and regional political transitions in the Arab world. These realities make labor policies and youth employment even more pertinent and pressing in 2012.” Sharing with delegates the government's new initiatives to address its labor challenges with creativity and transparency, the minister said the main challenge continues to be the creation of job opportunities for Saudi nationals in the private sector. “We need to create 3 million job opportunities by 2015, and 6 million by 2030. Our interventions therefore have to simultaneously address three areas, including job demand, job supply and market clearance,” he said. “Our job demand initiatives need to be both short and long-term. First, we are to focus on increasing demand for Saudi nationals by substituting some of the 8 million expatriate jobs in high quality jobs in the Kingdom.” He said in the longer-term the Kingdom needs larger scale initiatives. “Job supply is our second challenge. We have to deliver vocational training better. In most countries, the majority of students qualify for practical, technical and administrative jobs. The OECD average is 45 percent, but in the Kingdom only 9 percent of one age cohort will graduate with a vocational profession,” he said. “Our third challenge is to improve market clearance mechanisms and redesign the process of job seekers getting into available jobs. Our objective is for Saudi nationals to become the first choice of employers. And job seekers must be able to provide more relevant value to private sector employers.” The Ministry of Labor is developing a mutually reinforcing system of career counseling, training and capability building, coupled with support to find the right match between employers and job seekers, he added. The ministry will also provide new financial and other incentives for both employers and the unemployed, he said. Enumerating fresh initiatives over the past 12 months, the minister said the Hafiz program is a support program for job seekers. It provides job search support, job matching and basic training to more than a million young job seekers. It also provides unemployment benefits of SR2,000 per month (for a maximum of one year) for nearly 750,000 Saudis while they are seeking jobs. He said the government’s vision for Hafiz going forward is to host integrated services for job seekers, comprising job counseling, training and match-making with employers. We are developing a comprehensive database of 66 key labor market indicators. This ‘dashboard’ initiative is known as our Labor Market Observatory. It will help us track and understand labor market statistics, performance, and outcomes. It will be a key tool for fact-based decision-making by both researchers and policy-makers,” he said. Istiqdam is another initiative, he said, to provide expatriate work force to the private sector through “Labor Recruitment and Reassignment Companies.” This will give employers access to flexible or project-based labor.” Public-private partnerships will encourage vocational education suppliers into partnerships that may be employer-led or specialization-led. This initiative aims to increase the current capacity from approximately 10,000 students to a total of more than 200,000 over the next decade. He said small and medium-size business reforms are underway. “We have identified 38 specific initiatives to stimulate entrepreneurship and growth within SME businesses. These will be launched in the near future.” Job placement centers have been set up to register and counsel job seekers, address gaps in their capabilities, and match them to vacant positions. Many more such public-private partnerships will be encouraged. “Our Internet-based ‘Virtual Labor Market’ has automated job search engines, and is now accessible to everyone with Internet access. We are making online training available in e-learning modules for job seekers to use as needed,” he said. “The Kingdom’s labor inspection system must assure compliance with regulations and to reinforce transparency. The ministry is working in collaboration with the ILO to ensure that our labor inspections are in line with international labor standards.” He said Nitaqat was introduced several months ago and has been very widely discussed in the public, adding this initiative uses a more fact-based and differentiated approach to set quotas for employing Saudi nationals. Previously, all businesses faced a blanket Saudization quota of 30 percent (with some exceptions for certain sectors). Under the new Nitaqat program, companies are ranked with their peer companies in each category. Companies are graded into 230 categories of quotas—based on their industry, market activity and size. Within each group, companies are ranked based on actual Saudization achieved. The top 50 percent of better performing companies are marked Green or Silver. The bottom 20 percent performing companies are marked Red.