Saudi Labor Minister Adel Fakeih seen here speaking during the annual Ministry of Labor event held at King Fahad Cultural Center in Riyadh on Thursday night. Fakeih has come under heavy criticism for his enforcement of Saudization policies aiming to provide young Saudis with more jobs in the private sector, an effort to combat the high unemployment rate which reached 12 percent according to government statistics.
Saudi Labor Minister Adel Fakeih has come under heavy criticism for his recent policies like increasing visa fees for foreign workers and the crackdown on illegals. Asharq al-Awsat columnist Hussein Shobokshi comes to his defense:
Adel Fakeih, the minister of labor, endured harsh insults and criticism by ill-wishers who would never dare to express themselves in public. Despite this, he always made tough-yet-convincing arguments about the importance of finding solutions and the necessity for everyone, not just the private sector, to contribute. For him, there lies the real challenge. Therefore, everyone must take part to make this noble enterprise succeed. Most importantly, everyone must be accountable and liable to punishment if found guilty of negligence or corruption.
To succeed in this challenge is a matter of public interest. Failure will have risky consequences for everyone. It is true that the Saudi minister of labor has competently accomplished a task that is both unpleasant and uneasy; however, his accomplishment will definitely go down in history. Therefore, he deserves our respect and appreciation.
Ever since the government announced its decision to hike visa fees for foreign workers, Minister of Labor Adel Fakieh has been on the defensive trying to explain the motives and goals of his policy. However, Fakieh has recently decided to launch a charm offensive, appearing on television and inviting bloggers and tweeps to dinner parties at five star hotels. Saad Al Dosary was invited to a dinner hosted by the ministry in Jeddah, and he came out convinced because “it’s hard to argue with numbers”:
There are 7 million non-Saudi workers making a living here, while there are 2 millions Saudis looking for a job. The math is simple. Now, having said that, we could say the ministry’s strategy is based on two main pillars: The first, to give Saudis, males and females, a fair chance to compete over available jobs in the market. The second is to fix and reform the dysfunctional labor market. The decision to increase the fees is only one of many decisions and initiatives the ministry is adapting to amend the stale labor market.
Jamal Khashoggi on the campaign against Saudi Labor Minister Adel Fakieh:
There are many reasons behind the conservative current’s “hatred” towards Adel Fakieh even if at some point, it is overlapping with some business reasons; they are obsessed with fighting decisions that allow women to work, and they want to limit the work of women in women’s necessities stores. The law has included so far women's lingerie stores so it would be ratified. Nevertheless, the religious current knows well that “women’s necessities” can include dozens of other stores. This is a strategic alliance with the retail dealers who prefer to hire a foreign “male” who arranges the ladies’ lingerie, in obvious opposition with the conservative nature of Saudi society: for Saudi merchant, the foreign male sales person is less costly than Saudi woman who needs to be employed, and work with a double salary and who would be working for limited hours. The Saudi female worker will need an insurance coverage in accordance with the regulations of the Ministry of Labor: all these requirements are additional costs that businessmen prefer to avoid! Economics and accounting rules to increase the profits and minimize losses, is the engine for those businessmen, and not the national morals and the supreme national interest that the Minister of Labor is working on. As for the religious current, the important thing is that this foreign “male” will guarantee that women will not work in public.
The religious tide does not care about Adel Fakieh’s numbers, such as the fact that 85 percent of those registered in the “incentive” program that registers the unemployed are two million Saudi women. This is a clear message to the religious current stating that their festering speech that refuses the women's work idea and discouraging women has failed. There are 1.7 million Saudi females who wish to work: many of them prefer to work as teachers, while others want to work under the terms of the clergy, i.e. without interacting with the opposite sex. The economy is directing the people and not the heartless preaching. Half of the women are willing to work in the retail sector for example, and that is strongly opposed by religious men: the need for job and income are what motivate women and put pressure on the State that is represented by the Ministry of Labor. These women and 360 thousand of young Saudis, where most of them did not finish the secondary education, constitute 10 percent of the Saudi population.
Clerics who oppose gender mixing at the workplace have given an ultimatum to Saudi Minister of Labor Adel Fakieh: he has one month to roll back on the policy allowing women to work in retail, or they will pray to God to give him cancer.
Local media reported that more than 200 clerics from around the Kingdom had come to Riyadh and held a meeting Tuesday afternoon at the Ministry with Fakieh to complain about gender mixing in retail stores, accusing him of challenging religious authorities in the country like the Council of Senior Ulema.
“Stop women employment or we will pray against you like we have done with the previous Labor Minister,” a cleric named Abdulrahman Aba-Nemai reportedly told Fakieh. The cleric was referring to the late Ghazi al-Gosaibi who passed away in August 2010 and had to face similar opposition from conservatives over women employment. A video uploaded to YouTube showed some attendees cheer with the sounds of takbeer as Aba-Nemai talked to Fakieh.
Defending the policy, Fakieh said women have worked in sales since the days of the Prophet and that there is nothing in Islam forbidding such work. “Women in our country have worked in sales before, and in some regions they still do,” he said. “But now, foreign men are selling lingerie to our women. No jealous man would accept this.” Fakieh also rejected the accusation that his ministry is pushing an agenda to “westernize” society through the employment of women and refused to discuss the motives behind his policy. “Only God knows about motives, and I won’t say more on this,” he told the clerics.
The Saudi government have worked to encourage more women to join the workforce as part of its plans to tackle the high unemployment rate which they officially put at 10.5. The Minister told local media last October that more than 80 percent of the 1.5 million unemployed Saudi nationals looking for work are women.
This is the second visit in two weeks by the clerics to the Ministry of Labor to protest women employment. When the clerics visited the Ministry last week Fakieh only met with them briefly because they showed up without appointment and promised to meet them again. Describing yesterday’s meeting, al-Hayat said Fakieh had to face a “heated verbal pelting” by the clerics. “We don’t want solutions for women employment,” they told him. “We just want it stopped.”
Fakieh was defiant and told the clerics they have the right to offer advice and if he, as a government officla, decided not not to take their advice then they are free to go the courts and sue the Ministry.
“Some of you have already gone to the courts to oppose the Ministry of Labor’s decision,” he said. “If the courts ruled against the decision, we will cancel it.”
Abdo Khal challenges the clerics who swarmed into the Ministry of Labor earlier this week to protest women employment to “take up the matter with relevant higher authorities,” i.e. the King, because he knows they won’t. He has one thing to say to them:
I say one thing to these scholars, if they do not have women in their family who need to work for a living, they should be thankful and grateful to Almighty Allah. But they should know that there are women out there who desperately need work to provide for their families.
If those scholars can provide for every woman who needs work thus saving her the trouble of going out in the market for work, they should do so. But if they cannot, they should not demand that the ministry prevent women from working.
Such thing is unacceptable and does not make any sense.
More than one hundred Saudi clerics gathered at the Ministry of Labor to express their objection to the ministry’s policy aiming to provide more work opportunities for women, local news sites reported Saturday.
Users on social media sites circulated pictures and videos showing droves of the clerics, dressed in their red-and-white checkered shmagh and cloaks as they entered the building of the ministry in Riyadh and waited outside the minister’s office.
Sources told Sabq that the clerics were at first denied entry to the ministry headquarters by security, but were later allowed to enter and met briefly with the Minister Adel Fakeih. The site reported that the clerics complained about MOL’s decisions allowing gender mixing in workplaces. Fakeih has reportedly listened to them “for minutes” before excusing himself because, he said, the clerics have shown up without appointment.
With the unemployment rate officially above 10.5, the Saudi government is under high pressure to provide work opportunities for its youth, especially women. Fakieh said last October that there are 1.5 million Saudi nationals looking for work, 80 percent of them are women. 40 percent of those women have college degrees, he added.
But the government push for women employment have faced resistance from religious conservative who warn that the mixing of genders at the workplace would lead to social disintegration and the Westernization of Saudi Arabia. The clerics were recently bolstered by a statement from Abdul-Latif Al Alsheikh, head of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, who criticized MOL for what he described as the minister’s failure to maintain a “good clean environment” for women working at retail stores.
The government dismissed these charges.
“We want to open a whole new world for women, and at the same time will be in tune with our culture with how we’d like our families to continue to be,” Fakeih told the Washington Post. “We don’t want necessarily to copy a Western lifestyle.”
Nice piece in the Washington Post about women unemployment in Saudi Arabia. Most of the good stuff are on the third page*, though, where the reporter Kevin Sullivan speaks with Saudi Labor Minister Adel Fakeih:
Officials acknowledge that change comes slowly in such a hard-line religious environment.
“It is not happening in as many numbers as we would like, but it is happening,” said Labor Minister Adel M. Fakeih. “Women are working in the banking sector, in manufacturing, in training and development, human resources, in consulting.”
Fakeih said his department was trying to create jobs that allow women to work from home so they can still manage children and household responsibilities.
“We want to open a whole new world for women, and at the same time will be in tune with our culture with how we’d like our families to continue to be,” he said. “We don’t want necessarily to copy a Western lifestyle.”
Fakeih noted that some women don’t have a “sense of urgency” to work, because under Islamic sharia law, men are required to be financially responsible for women. Even if a woman earns far more money than her husband, he is required to pay for her needs, Fakeih said.
“She can decide not to spend any of her money,” he said. “She can just keep her money to go to Hawaii or something. That’s the law.”
A sense of urgency is lacking in many things in our country.
* shame on WaPo for not providing a single-page view of stories on their site
The number of Saudi women working at the private sector more than doubled during the past twelve months, Minister of Labor Adel Fakieh said Tuesday, according to al-Riyadh daily. Speaking at a women employment forum in Riyadh, Fakieh said there are 1.5 million Saudi nationals looking for work, 80 percent of them are women. Based on information drawn from the ministry’s unemployment benefits program Hafiz, 40 percent of the women looking for work have a college degree, he said. ♦
