Cabinet’s committee urged to expedite industrial sector help

KUWAIT CITY, March 21: High-level sources from the industrial sector have called on the General Secretariat of Cabinet’s COVID-19 emergency ministerial committee, which is responsible for approving the recruitment of specialized technical workers and issuing their entry visas, about the need to accelerate the pace of their work during the current period, given the current conditions that factories are exposed to due to their inability to recruit the required technical workers, reports Al-Anba daily. In exclusive statements to the daily, the sources stressed that the slow pace of the committee’s work has caused major administrative and operational challenges for all local factories in the country, indicating that this threatens the future and continuity of many of these factories, especially in light of the difficulty in recruiting technical workers who are necessary to operate machinery and equipment in these factories.

The sources explained that the slowdown and delay in issuing entry visas to industrial experts and technical workers needed by the factories have been causing great harm to the industrial sector and in turn to the economy of Kuwait. Therefore, it has become necessary to accelerate the pace of issuing the entry visas and work permits more than before in order to avoid the damages and problems that local factories are exposed to. The production lines in a number of factories have become threatened with complete shutdown after the departure of a large number of specialized technical workers and their inability to return to Kuwait.

Also, some factories are not able to fulfill their obligations with government contracts and projects, which have been in motion since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the attempts of the Public Authority for Manpower (PAM) to find solutions to this issue by opening the door for transferring workers from one sector to another, these attempts failed. This is because the market in Kuwait lacks a basis for specialized technical workers. The workers who were allowed to transfer were mostly involved in marginal employment that does not have a fundamental role in the local industrial sector.