Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Pricing Emiratis out of a job.

The National has a story this morning about security guards in Dubai protesting because they are payed much less than their colleagues in Abu Dhabi.

At the beginning of the year the the Ministry of Interior declared a minimum salary for expat guards at Dh2,000 a month, but that hasn't yet been applied in Dubai.

However, there was a particular sentence in the story that intrigued me:

"In January, the Ministry of Interior announced that expatriate security guards would have to earn at least Dh2,000 a month and Emirati ones Dh6,000 as part of a new accreditation scheme for private security companies. "

Now I can see that maybe the Emirati salary was introduced in an attempt to encourage Emiratis to apply for employment. But I can't imagine any company owner tripling his salary bill simply to employ them.

Counter productive, surely?



The story is here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The difference is paid by the government. Basically a subsidy from the Govt of Abu Dhabi to the company.

This doesnt apply to Dubai though.

So basically the 4K difference is a subsidy from a govt to it's citizen.

We have the same in the banks... but its 12K. Muahahaha!

Seabee said...

Thanks for the info ABIT, now it makes sense.

hut said...

Emiratis price themselves out of the job market by insisting on gratuitously high salaries and perks. We don't 'do' locals in our firm for that reason.
Muahahaha, as ABIT says....