End of sponsorship in UAE- Police chief calls

hy,

If the sponsorship system is cancelled here, as I said a while ago:

I will only employ people locally, with a test period of 2 months. I'm not bringing anybody here.

If they are incompetent, during the test period, I'd just fire them. Citing a clause in the contract.

If it's after the test period, I'd just prove it, and fire them. I'm not responsible for them.

I'm not paying for any tickets, I got them here, and I don't care if they go back to their country.

I'm not paying for any MOI fees, it's the employee's personal visa, not mine. I'd be responsible for the Ministry of Labour fees.

I would pay a fair salary, since I'd have to (to retain the good people), but I'd increase prices for our customers (the difference has to come from somewhere).

I'd probably use more part-timers, contractors, and remote workers (outsourcing, maybe to India, other Asian countries, or non-EU Eastern Europe). They do the job, and get out of it. I'd keep a skeleton staff on-site.

Construction companies will use more pre-manufactured parts that can be quickly assembled. The parts would be manufactured wherever it's cheap, and the laborers would be working much less hours.

I've observed the recent 'actual' system of visa sponsorship in Qatar and somehow I still find it better with respects to leverage of population influx. It also helps to the lesser-fortunate hired workers from different countries (I'm supposed to say 'professionally-hired workers' but it now sounds like a different story) who cannot compensate for their own paperwork and medical checkups.

It's just that the right to hold your own passport after stamping it with the resident visa becomes a different issue. You can't blame the sponsorship system for having to hold one's passport as there were really really plenty of people who would just 'grab another opportunity' without even a notified approval by his own previous company, kinda like an AWOL. It may probably be the only way to 'control' greed among employees with respect to his own professional and responsible conduct.

Now choosing the right person for the job position is a different story, hence my previous comment above.

"Everything in this book may be wrong." Illusions: The Adventures of The Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach

Shadi misses the point

Posted by Peter Peter, dubai, UAE on Friday 8 May 2009 at 13:28 UAE time

I am sorry to say Shadi misses the point completely and so do many others.

As employers we are ready to compete in the open market for talent but unlike other European or Asian countries I am also a slave of this system.

Each visa costs me roughly Dhs. 8,000/- and an additional 3 - 4,000/- for the new recruits' air ticket. It also costs me an average of Dhs. 5,000/- in ads and agent's fees to find someone.

More often than not the recruit is not ideal as the local laws do not allow me to try out a person for a couple of weeks to see if he is good enough and is actually capable of doing everything he/she claims in the CV. I have to spend 15 - 17,000/- dirhams per recruit and have only his CV and one or two interviews to make my decision.

If after all this I have to bring in staff, train them and then loose them to someone who pays a few hundred more then it is totally unfair.

In 2005 we lost Dhs. 1,00,000/- on seven visas of staff that jumped jobs or were fired within a few months. Some were incompetent others had accepted our job when their third visit visa was about to expire - with the full intention of jumping the job once they had time to look around. One was found stealing from the company. How many small businesses can survive such losses and disruption ?

Please also add to this fact that over the last few years rents have gone through the roof , business levels have fallen and there is unfair competition from those expats who do not take a residence visa but keep living and working off visit visas that they can stamp at the airport or the Hatta border for no cost at all .

Every week I get CVs from staff who had fancy salaries but were either not paid on time or lost their jobs because the company could not afford to keep them.

Only when you take all this into account you will understand the real heroics of the small and medium employers who have doggedly kept their businesses running and paid salaries on time !

Yes it is true that many businesses will fold if employers have to compete for talent in an open market. But think of this :

Nowhere in the world can a business survive if the rents jump by more than 100% in one year. That happened in Dubai.

Nowhere in the world can a business survive if the CEO has to spend weeks and months , year after year , fighting his landlord from evicting him on some silly excuse , simply because he has another tenant willing to pay double. This happens in Dubai.

Nowhere in the world can a business survive if they can not hire AND fire at will ! As an employer there are umpteen rules which make things difficult if not impossible at times.

Nowhere in the world has there been such a sudden influx of population where infrastructure , local transportation , accommodation , office space , warehousing facilities etc. just could not keep up with demand. All this happened in Dubai.

So let us accept that Dubai is a phenomenon unlike anything else in history. It is a amazingly bold experiment. It is a dream we all want to share in . We all came here for our own reasons and accepted what we got. Some had it better than others.

To the lesser or greater degree this is true of the other GCC countries also.

Yes if the workers want their freedom , so do we the employers.

I think this liberalization is an excellent step in the right direction and we support it. All we want is that the employers also get a fair deal.

Let us ALL have a level playing field then we can all enjoy the game - together.

Somehow it now also reflects to the current situation in some of Qatar's companies: the mutual problem with the proper hiring of an employee by way of sponsor's right and his own HR. One of the international companies I know had the difficulty to make it a point to suffice the proper professional workforce and their proper salary adjustments and requirements because the 'sponsor' has more power to 'choose' its own manpower (without even looking for evident proof that their recently hired employees are up and tested for professional standards) and thus has more entry of non-pro workers, leaving the chief or a higher representative of the international company a little bit of difficult to compromise for the 'misconducts' severely made by many of its previous or present employees as they were 'conceptually' hired for 'cheap labour' reasons...without even an interview from the proper representative of the said int'l company.

"Everything in this book may be wrong." Illusions: The Adventures of The Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach

in that website caught my attention, and it says:

"Go out and catch some bad guys: Why is the head cop talking about something totally unrelated to his brief? Is he being primed for a whole lot of recently vacated posts around town?"-

hmm...in reading, I started to wonder why too:)

what do U think is the catch here?

Laws are usually made to "Regulate" something... Regulating something usually makes it worse.

Look at these definitions:

regulation - the state of being controlled or governed

Regulation can be considered as legal restrictions promulgated by government authority.

One can consider regulation as actions of conduct imposing sanctions (such as a fine).

a catch.

i'm sure.

There has to be a catch... nothing is as it looks.

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I don't think Bats would be allowed to work under the LMRA scheme..

Whilst the LMRA would regulate the movement of labour, it could also utilize Al-Alawi's previous suggestion of six year maximum stay rule..

http://www.arabianbusiness.com/554721-bahrain-scraps-foreign-labour-sponsorship-scheme

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FOREIGN LABOUR: Bahrain scraps existing sponsorship system in bid to reduce need for expat workers.

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"Under the new regulations, foreign workers will be directly sponsored by the Labour Market Regulatory Authority (LMRA) and therefore able to move jobs without the consent of their previous employer.

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The previous system, which is common in the Gulf Arab states and under which employers do the sponsoring, has long been criticised by human rights groups for placing workers at the whim of their employers, who usually take their passports"

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I believe what Bleu says. There has to be a catch.

You didn't read the important part, it's not about YOUR rights, but OURS:

"They [employees] should be responsible for their own actions, paper work and medical check ups,"

"the current sponsorship system was a burden on the UAE’s economy and Emiratis"

Here's how it would go:

You apply at MOI for a visa, they refuse it a few times, then after a while, they let you in, with a 1-year visa.

You have no sponsor.

You pay the visa and medical check-up fees every year (let's say QR2000), an employer has nothing to do with this, it's YOUR personal visa.

You have no job, no salary.

You start applying for a job.

You find a job after a while.

You won't get a bank loan unless you make at least QR20k.

You can't change jobs before an approval from your current employer (we would change the name from sponsor to employer, we would still call this paper NOC), we could also call it an NDA, signed by both the employer and the employee (looks nicer).

MOI would refuse renewing your visa after a while.

You can't come in...Go back to step 1, no official 2-year ban, but they let you in when they want to.

Not many changes...but that's a much nicer image.

Remember, if that happens, nobody would interview you while you're out of the country... Get a visa first, then they'll see you, it's your responsibility.

Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim's statement is a very sensible statement.

I didnt understand what does this mean ?

Anyways the contract is between the employee and the company.

How will this be better for the employee ie the expatriates

that a society can effectively match a person to an appropriate position or job.

I cannot imagine why this system even exists, because it is completely innefficient.

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Dubai..i am coming...:)

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mzain, aapkay mouth main ghee shakkar

..........i hope this sponsership system ends in Qatar too...........

how I wish!