"Jordanization of careers" to reduce Jordanians' unemployment and layoffs of foreign workers

Ayman Fadilat - Oman

Egyptian worker Mustafa Al Bayoumi did not expect that his renewal of the work permit in the field of electricity installations and telecommunications networks, at a value of one thousand dinars (one dinar equivalent to 1.4 dollars) in the middle of this year, would lose his importance after the Ministry of Labor decided to close the work in this sector in front of foreign workers.

The situation of the Egyptian worker Bayoumi resembles thousands of expatriate workers in Jordan. The Syrian refugee, Emad Al-Hourani, who has a work permit to perform home maintenance work, has become invalid, because work in this profession is closed to foreign workers and is restricted to Jordanians only.

Jordan suffers from a high rate of unemployment among young people, which reached 19% this year, according to official statistics, which prompted the Ministry of Labor to a set of official decisions that were restricted to expatriate workers, in exchange for opening the door for work for unemployed Jordanian youth.

War on unemployment
The most important decisions announced by the Jordanian Minister of Labor, Nidal Al-Batayneh, a few days ago, were to close the occupations of enterprises with economic activity related to home maintenance and electrical equipment maintenance, so that non-Jordanian workers are not allowed to work with them.

According to Al Bataynah’s interview with Al Jazeera Net, it has become necessary for all establishments to achieve employment rates for Jordanians, and their continued participation in social security, as a condition for the continuation of enterprises obtaining work permits.

The Ministry of Labor seeks to "Jordanize the profession of cleaners for workers in the municipalities of the Kingdom by the end of the year 2024", so that the percentages of workers in the cleaning sector as national workers from expatriate workers will be reduced and replaced by Jordanians with specific percentages during the next four years, starting from 2020 until early 2024.

The Ministry of Labor allowed for wholesale and retail trade, loading and unloading, vegetable and fruit traders and intermediaries inside the central markets to employ an expatriate worker in exchange for operating three Jordanians, according to the warehouse spaces, and the quantities received for vegetable merchants per ton.

The Minister of Labor justified the reasons for resorting to these decisions with the aim of "providing employment opportunities for Jordanians, especially the unemployed youth in the private sector, reducing unemployment rates, and controlling the job market by preventing expatriate workers from working in sectors that Jordanians accept."

The current year witnessed multiple sit-ins for hundreds of unemployed youth, and from the various governorates of the Kingdom, they were sleeping days and nights in front of the Royal Court in the center of the capital Amman, demanding the provision of suitable job opportunities for them, whether in the governmental or private sector or the security and military services.

Dismissive criticism
The voices rejecting the decisions of the Ministry of Labor were not limited to the affected expatriate workers, as they criticized the industrial, agricultural, and commercial sectors, exporters and contractors, who rely mainly on their work for expatriate workers; the decisions.

Employers prefer employing expatriate workers instead of Jordanians for several reasons, the most prominent of which is the high efficiency of expatriate workers, and they bear heavy and long working conditions, and low wages compared to Jordanians.

In front of that, Al-Batayneh pointed out that if decisions take into account the interests of investors and different economic sectors, it may conflict with the interests of some sectors, but in the end there is a supreme national interest.

Threat to invest
Economic analyst Ahmed Awad said that "any country has the right to close or open professions to expatriate workers," but only if this is done in consultation with various economic sectors, because a decision of this kind suddenly would affect investments and employers.

Awad added that improving the terms and conditions of work is what drives Jordanians to accept them, expecting that young people will not accept work in these sectors due to inappropriate work conditions, in terms of the difficulty of work, low wages and the environment that repels them.

There are about one million migrant workers from Arab, Asian and African nationalities in Jordan, of whom about 550,000 hold work permits, and the rest work in a different way, and the majority of them are Egyptian workers, who are matched by about three hundred thousand Jordanian and Jordanian unemployed.

Evaded labor
The specialist in foreign labor affairs, Linda Clash, saw in the decisions a case of confusion in the Ministry of Labor. Every day, the instructions change and new decisions are issued opposing its predecessors, which confuses the labor market and creates problems for investors.

And she continued in her interview with Al-Jazeera Net that the results of the decisions will be to increase the informal workers evading and exposing the Jordanian youth from these occupations, as a result of the inadequate working conditions for them, in addition to that, the suffering of the Syrian refugees with permits will be increased when the doors of these professions are closed to them.