New GCC law to regulate foreign labour

GCC countries will soon pass a law regulating foreign labor in the Gulf countries, including returning to their home countries “marginal” and unskilled foreign workers, a Gulf official said. “There are responsible parties at the Council looking for a mechanism to verify whether or not the expat worker does have the skill for which or was brought to the Gulf,” the official told local media. The Council will also attempt to eliminate workers who claim skills they do not possess. Fawzi Al Majdali, secretary general of the program for restructuring the labor force and the executive agency in Kuwait, said the new regulations will minimize unused labor, which has no clear contracts with employers. “This kind of labor created imbalances in the Gulf labor market, and neither businesses nor the society is benefiting from it, not to mention that they move around with no controls,” he said. He said that there are plans under study. “Kuwait has recently said that it will cut down and send away 100,000 expat workers who are considered marginal in order to replace them with local labor,” he said. “The new regulations should be enforced in the Gulf countries, and we are thinking of having the expat labor which is brought to Kuwait to sit for tests, in order to verify whether or not they are skilled in the professions they are brought for,” he said. “We sometimes found that a worker’s profession as recorded in his passport is not the same as the profession he is actually skilled in, and there we are seeking a mechanism through which we can verify the worker’s true profession, he added. Source: ArabNews