Ethnic-Based Discrimination

Monday, 12 February 2007
By Sabria S Jawhar
The Saudi Gazette

Recently I met a friend of mine who works as a nurse at a government hospital. She looked upset and unmotivated. She told me that she feels there is a sort of ethnic-based discrimination in the organization where she works.

She also said that she feels inferior when she compares her salary to that of her colleague who gets more than double because she is Westerner.
“We work in the same ward and do the same job,” she said.

I used to think that perhaps Saudis hunt for cheap foreign labor, which is reflected in the quality of the job when they come here.

I called a friend who works in the Saudi health sector. He told me that when they look for new staff they usually look for countries that offer the needed specialty. Then, they look for qualified people among the list based on cost. For instance, if they find the same specialty with the same qualifications in a south Asian country and in a Western one, they go to the Asian simply because it costs less. From an economic perspective, that sounded fair enough. Yet still the problem to me was what if the number of specialists from the Asian country does not match that in demand and we had to complete it with experts from a Western country? Are we going to employ the two nurses in the same department and ask them to carry out the same responsibilities while we pay one more than the other?

Indian and Filipina nurses, for instance, might accept it and feel excited at the beginning especially that most of them come to the Kingdom with heavy debts and need the monthly paycheck to send home to their families. But that won’t last long as they will start comparing their salaries to those of the Westerners and would feel inferior. This feeling of injustice would be reflected in their performance and attitude towards their employers. They would also consider that as a sort of ethnic-based discrimination.

I discussed the issue with a member of the Shoura Council. He told me that people have to differentiate between the minimum wages that are usually laid down by the government for its own citizens and the minimum contract value that is usually determined by the government of the target country.

That value, he said, is usually determined according to different factors, including rate of unemployment in that country, the availability of the specialty and the standard of living in both the native and host countries.

He said the cost of education in a Western country is different from that in Asia. In most of the cases employees from Western countries get trained in internationally certified establishments that are equipped with state-of-the-art technology. By the end of the day, he added, it is a matter of supply and demand and developing countries are keen to get their people employed in order to survive.

I still feel sad for my Indian friend as it is easy to explain that fact to her but how to explain the gap in the standard of living between her and her colleague inside Saudi Arabia taking into consideration the cost of living here? That difference might not be so apparent among those who work for government establishments as they work hard to create a homogeneous atmosphere for all nationalities.

But the fact that foreigners hold about 90 percent of the jobs in the private sector and that there is a huge potential for exploitation and bad living standard, there is a huge disincentive to make waves.

The overwhelming majority of those 90 percent come from Asia, not from the West. For example, the largest Indian expatriate community in the world is in Saudi Arabia. It stands at more than 1 million workers. Bangladesh has almost about the same number and so does Pakistan.

Low-income workers, in most of the cases, live a miserable life just to save as much as possible to send back home to their families. Sometimes they would rather die than to go to a private hospital for medication. They are not allowed to bring in their families. Their income in most of the cases doesn’t help them to go home annually to see them. I believe if there is minimum contract value for this class of workers fixed in their countries, this should be reviewed by their own governments. If not, then the Saudi government must make sure that they get a salary that allows them to lead a respectful life during their stay, like in some of the Western countries.

If their wages were raised to an acceptable level, those workers will be able to have their families with them. This means that they will spend part of their income on their families here and that a huge part of the Saudi money will stay here instead of being transferred. This will also make them feel stable and more productive as they have their near and dear ones around.