Abid Khazandar Al-Riyadh newspaper The Council of Saudi Chambers has, according to a local daily, finalized amendments to be incorporated into the labor law. The amendments will be submitted to the Shoura council for consideration. Among others, the amendments included training of manpower. It was made imperative on private companies and establishments to provide training to their employees. Companies are required to set aside between 2 and 5 percent of their annual profits to finance training programs. The question that comes to my mind after reading this news is: Which employees will be trained? Foreigners or Saudis? If the employees are Saudis, then these amendments are most welcome. If the training programs also include expatriate workers, then many questions come to mind. Firstly, are the expatriate workers we import untrained? Do we have to spend money on their training rather than spend it on fighting poverty, for example? If the training includes foreign manpower, then this is a tragedy. We should immediately take action against importing untrained foreign manpower. When we allow foreigners to be trained in our country, we are essentially agreeing to provide a substandard product or service to citizens and it is no secret that citizens often suffer due to untrained foreign workers. There is an Arabic saying that comes to mind: Allow barbers to be trained on the heads of orphans. I recently also read that Korean construction companies are back in the Kingdom. One of them is actually implementing the Jazan refinery project. I welcome such companies because they bring their trained and qualified workers with them and when they finish their jobs in the Kingdom, they take them back. They do not release their workers to infiltrate the market like other construction companies, including the Saudi ones, do. These are all things we must think about if we are to introduce labor reforms that truly benefit citizens and help reduce unemployment.
