Bahrain's Minister of Labor Speaks on Sources of Current GCC Unemployment Levels

The Bahraini Minister of Labor, Dr. Majeed bin Mohsen al Alawi submitted a valuable lecture at the 15th Annual Conference of the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research (ECSSR) on rising unemployment in the GCC Countries; a battle whose source he argues, traces back to the initial phases of development following the independence and subsequent economic boom as a result of exceptional natural resource wealth in the region; a blessing incompatible with small local populations.

"The basic problem with the Gulf countries is that they have laid down, with the beginning of the oil boom in the 1970s, the foundations of a process of development whose target is not all the citizens of the region. This has led to recruiting 14 million workers from abroad to fill essential roles...I reiterate that the essence of the problem of unemployment in the Gulf is the model of development. How can we conceive of the presence of 14 million jobs occupied by foreigners while we have more than a million unemployed Gulf citizens? I refer here to the figures that express this imbalance; these include the fact that 80 percent of the jobs in the Gulf are occupied by an unskilled and semi-skilled workforce. While the construction sector represents 8 percent of GDP in the UAE, it employs 40 percent of the total workforce."

Dr. al Alawi also spoke directly about Bahrain's historically high unemployment rate which has recently been "controlled" and driven down to 4% partly thanks to the Kingdom's regionally unique insurance fund for unemployment that provides safeguards for the unemployed and enhances their ability to enter the workforce by offering training and entry-level education in a variety of fields.