Kuwaitis ‘hesitate’ to work in various government agencies due to low pay

KUWAIT CITY, July 9: According to a recent statistic, nine government agencies affiliated to the Ministry of Finance have 563 job vacancies currently.

Those agencies have employed about 184 Kuwaiti citizens since the issuance of Resolution No. 11/2017 by the Civil Service Commission (CSC). They also terminated the services of 87 expatriates and offered those vacated positions to Kuwaiti citizens.

The statistic explained that many government agencies acknowledge the difficulty in appointing Kuwaiti citizens due to their reluctance to take up such jobs because of low salaries or their lack of preference for such jobs.

However, government agencies will not hesitate to raise the level of Kuwaitization and lay off as many expatriates as possible in line with the instructions of the Cabinet and CSC in this regard.

These governmental corridors justified the increase in the number of job vacancies in them for years to the decrease in the monthly salary determined in accordance with the internal regulations for personnel affairs.

This resulted in the reluctance among Kuwaiti citizens to take up those jobs, despite more than 34 advertisements posted by these agencies in less than a year. These agencies include the Public Institution for Social Security which has 180 job vacancies. On the other hand, there are entities that recorded the highest rate of Kuwaitization, such as the Central Bank of Kuwait, which succeeded in registering the highest rate of Kuwaitis in history to reach 91.7 percent.

It also succeeded in reducing the number of expatriate employees to below 2.7 percent. During the current fiscal year, it employed about 97 Kuwaiti citizens.

The statistic revealed that the Ministry of Finance is committed to applying the Kuwaitization policy in accordance with the CSC plan. It has terminated the services of employees from several job groups, and sent ten warnings to non-Kuwaiti employees to urge them to complete their end-ofservice procedures.(Al Anba)