Humayyid, Deputy Minister of Labor, has reiterated that only persons with a genuine need for unemployment benefit would be entitled to receive it, and noted that some persons who had signed up to the program were already employed. Speaking at the G20 meeting in Paris last week, Al-Humayyid said that the government's “Hafiz” program, – “Incentive” – would only dispense aid to jobseekers on the condition they enroll on training programs to increase their prospects of finding employment. The first payments would begin, he said, at the beginning of the next Hijra year, corresponding to late November. “The assistance is not something one can simply depend on for the rest of one's life,” Al-Humayyid said. “Unfortunately, some people have signed on to the program to claim money and we have found that they actually already have jobs in the private or public sector. Sometimes they are students.” Al-Humayyid said that background checks on names were being carried out through electronic matches with registers at the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Ministry of Trade and Industry, the latter to “ensure the name has no commercial register and is not involved in any commercial activity”. The deputy minister said that the means by which the job market could take on women “requires attention”, noting that 76 percent of unemployed Saudi women are university educated. “That shows that Saudi women have been able to achieve great success in education and that they truly are ready to work.” On the Kingdom's dependence on foreign labor, Al-Humayyid described the Saudi people as “addicted to recruitment from abroad”. The issue resides, he said, in the low wages for which persons from impoverished economies are willing to work, resulting in “unfair competition” for Saudis, “particularly if we take into account the fact that the Saudi is living in his own society and has different living and social circumstances to those of the foreign worker”. “I don't mean for ‘addicted to foreign recruitment' to be taken in any popular sense,” he said. “Instead it's come as a result of certain definable factors and specific historical circumstances experienced in the Kingdom since the seventies.” He described the process of recruitment from abroad as having been thus far a “profitable trade operation”. “But now we see that the time has come to change that perception through these new programs,” he said, referring to job seeker assistance and renewed government efforts for the Saudization of the workforce.
