The legal and legislative committee of the country’s National Assembly yesterday “approved a proposal calling to reduce the percentage of non-Kuwaitis in government jobs to 20% from [the current ceiling of] 28%”, according to a report this morning in the onlineKuwait Times, and other Gulf publications.
The proposal, which is aimed at creating more jobs for Kuwaitis, also calls on the Civil Service Commission "to find jobs for Kuwaitis within six months of applying, or alternatively pay[ing] them the salaries expected from the sought job”, the Kuwait Times report said.
The publication said some 386,000 people are employed by the Kuwaiti public sector, of whom 109,000, or 28%, are expatriates. Thus if the cap were to be enforced immediately, “at least 30,000 expatriates working in the government must be dismissed and replaced by Kuwaitis”, the report noted.
The new cap on expats working in Kuwait’s public sector is the latest in a series of proposed and in-force measures across the Gulf that are aimed at giving nationals living in the individual countries – who tend to be outnumbered by expats, as well as, often, less-highly skilled or experienced than their foreign counterparts – a break.
Yesterday’s vote came just a day after a group of eight Kuwaiti parliamentarians calling themselves the Independents called for subsidies for electricity, water and fuel be scrapped for expatriates only, but not for Kuwaiti nationals. If implemented, this move could increase expats’ electricity bills “twentyfold”, the Kuwait Times noted.
Official statistics show there are some 2.6 million expatriates living in Kuwait, compared with some 1.2 million Kuwaiti nationals. Its economy is dominated by oil exports, and politically it is a close ally of the US, the military bases of which it is host to.
