Kuwait three thousand expatriates’ contracts cancelled
The head of Kuwait Civil Service Commission, Ahmad Al-Jassar, announced that more than 3 thousand job contracts of non-Kuwaitis in government agencies had been cancelled during the first year of the implementation of the jobs resettlement policy.
Al-Jassar said on Saturday that the Civil Service Commission has cooperated with the Ministry of Finance to cancel 3140 jobs for non-Kuwaitis from the budgets of all government agencies, including ministries, departments, and parties with an attached budget and parties with an independent budget.
He added: “This cancellation came in the light of the policy the state has been adopting towards the resettlement of government jobs, based on the decision of the Civil Service Commission No. 11 of 2017,” according to Kuwait News Agency (KUNA).
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A few days ago, some MPs in the Kuwaiti parliament considered that the government’s attempts to implement the “replacement” (the resettlement of jobs) plan in the government sector did not reach ambitious levels, one year after the launching of the plan. The MPs rejected what they described as an “insufficient” policy the government has been adopting concerning this matter.
In September, the Civil Service Commission issued a decree to replace Kuwaitis with expatriates in government jobs during the next five years.
The Kuwaiti Government’s plan includes the government agencies’ commitment to reduce the number of the annual expatriate employees until 2022 to the number of Kuwaiti employees of the total workforce in the government and the determined percentages for each group of classified occupational categories.
The Kuwaiti government asserts that it does not target expatriates and does not consider the measures against them as a change in the population structure. It instead needs 140 thousand of them, provided they represent an added value to the country’s economy.
Foreigners in Kuwait constitute more than two-thirds of the population that reached about 7 million people in mid-2016.
