Page 215 - Aamir Rehman - Dubai & Co Global Strategies for Doing Business in the Gulf States-McGraw-Hill (2007)

Building Your Team: Human Capital Strategies for the GCC 197

toward males. One major reason for this skew is that the families of
male expatriate workers are not counted, presumably because they
have remained in the home country and not migrated to Oman.
The key conclusions to be drawn from this GCC population
pyramid point to the issues of job creation and the educational
needs of the young. These issues are in stark contrast with those
existing in many OECD markets, where the population pyramids
indicate looming pension and health care crises among retirees. As
three of the six GCC states—Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia—
already have double-digit unemployment, the pressure to create
employment opportunities for GCC nationals is immense.
Moreover, many employed nationals hold jobs in public-sector enti-
ties in which workforces will likely need to be trimmed if and when
they are privatized, which adds further urgency to the challenge of
employment. Policy makers are rightly concerned about creating
and freeing up jobs for young nationals either out of work today or
soon to be completing their education.
One policy that has been adopted by the governments of GCC
countries regionwide is that of “nationalization” of the workforce.
The purpose of this policy is to transfer jobs from expatriates to
nationals in order to alleviate the current unemployment crisis.
While nationalization policies have been adopted and reformed in
various Gulf countries for decades now, crafting truly effective poli-
cies has been a challenge. The objective is well understood, but the
implementation has been fraught with obstacles.
The typical approach taken until now by the governments of Gulf
countries to nationalize the workforce has been to dictate quotas. For
a given sector or industry, the governments have enacted regulations
declaring what percentage of staff must be local nationals. The quo-
tas are meant to force change in the private sector, as public-sector insti-
tutions tend already to be heavily nationalized. In fact, a secondary
objective in nationalizing the private workforce is to encourage citi-
zens to take private-sector jobs and thereby relieve some of the over-
staffing and inefficiencies of many government-linked institutions.
Table 7.2 provides a few examples from each GCC country of
policies or objectives that are in place in the effort to further nation-
alize the private sector. The list is by no means comprehensive, but
is meant to illustrate the types of measures being adopted by local
governments.