KUWAIT CITY, Sept 10: Dozens of employees of the Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy staged a sit-in yesterday morning to demand five allowances - occupational hazard allowance, hardship allowance, caliber allowance, pollution allowance, and work nature allowance for administrators. The spokesman Engineer Hassan Al- Roudhan, on behalf of the participants of the sit-down, said, “This is the fifth sit-in by the workers of the Ministry of Electricity and Water to demand our rights as citizens. We are exposed to pollutants, as identified by the Environment Public Authority, the Ministry of Electricity and Water, and Kuwait University through a scientific study conducted by the university with the cooperation of Harvard University. The power stations contain pollutants that are harmful to the employees working in them.

Despite this, the employees’ work is not classified as hard or harmful. When we contacted the ministry, the minister promised us that these demands would be approved but they have not been approved to this day. The employees played a major role last summer in producing the highest hours of electrical energy, in addition to water. However, these achievements were only met with negligence on the part of the officials in the ministry.” He said the letters sent by the ministry to some authorities have not borne any fruits, but they turned out to be letters to delay the rights of employees and continue the injustice inflicted on them.

Eng. Al-Roudhan revealed that the most prominent demands are the classification of employees’s work as hard work, the approval of a hazard allowance commensurating with the size of the risks to which the employees are exposed, the approval of a pollution allowance, the return of the reward for the engineering nature of the employees, the caliber reward, and the disbursement of allowance due to administrators. He appealed to His Highness the Prime Minister Sheikh Ahmad Al-Nawaf to intervene to solve the problems of employees in the Ministry of Electricity and Water and to uphold their rights. According to informed sources in the ministry, the majority of the protesters’ demands were submitted by the ministry to the concerned authorities, including the Occupational Health Department, the Civil Service Commission, and the Public Institution for Social Security.

These authorities require more study and time to decide on these demands and the extent to which employees deserve them according to the nature of work and the existing risks. The sources stressed the ministry’s keenness to approve any claims due to employees in accordance with the frameworks, laws, and regulations in force in the Civil Service Commission. By Mohammad Ghanem Al-Seyassah Staff