Saudi women will soon be able to work as cashiers in supermarkets and hypermarkets, said Qussay Filali, Director General of the Labor Office in Jeddah. The announcement came as an experimental program to employ women in those positions is proving to be a success, said an official at Azizia Panda, where the women are employed. Filali said the women's work will be subject to controls including setting up suitable barriers between men and women and families will have the choice to deal with male or female cashiers. Companies are ready to employ Saudi women in this field, having fulfilled conditions set by the Ministry of Labor, he added. Filali said giving the opportunity to Saudi women to join this career field is part of the Ministry of Labor's effort to open wider opportunities for women to work. As an experiment, Panda has started employing 16 women as cashiers in a store in Jeddah, said Dr. Muhammad Amin Qashqari, deputy managing director for retail sector at Savola Group and managing director of Azizia Panda. If the experiment is successful, Panda, which has received official approval for the project, would employ 2,500 women in its stores throughout the Kingdom with salaries reaching SR3,000, he said. He stressed that the company's policy aims to achieve the Kingdom's plan to provide women with job opportunities in new sectors. Azizia Panda studied the prospect of employing women as cashiers and found it appropriate to have women serve the high number of women and families who shop in the stores, said Qashqari, who added that the program is being monitored to ensure that it meets regulations. “The experiment is still new so it needs certain controls,” he said. “We did not make haste in employing women. We started with 16 women in one of our markets who work in different shifts.” He said the experiment has been encouraging because the women carry out their work with professionalism and there has been a good response from shoppers. Azizia Panda has 5,000 vacancies for youths and if the experiment is successful, the company would employ 2,500 women, he said. Qashqari said his international experience in the retail sector shows that the job of cashier, which requires a high level of skill, is suitable for women. A source in the Ministry of Labor said more than 1.5 million employees are working in the Kingdom's retail sector, which has the highest percentage of employee turnover. About 16 percent of people in the sector, almost 240,000 people, are Saudis and more than 7,000 youths are working as cashiers.
