Young Saudis are rapidly taking over the jobs of foreigners

In Saudi Arabia, no one has a hard time naming their monthly salary. „700 riyal [ongeveer 175 euro]”, says the Bengali street sweeper who works in the port city of Jeddah corniche sweeps, the boulevard along the Red Sea. „1,200 riyals [ongeveer 300 euro]”, says the driver about the Nepalese housekeepers in his bus, which he lets get off for a bathroom break at a roadhouse near Mecca.

The women meekly get back in, on their way to their Saudi families. Housekeepers only cost them 100 riyals (25 euros) per year in permit costs, in addition to the monthly salary, food and housing. Cleaners and housekeepers are the last cheap foreigners in Saudi Arabia, where almost a third of the 34 million inhabitants work as expats: guest workers.

All other expats – or their employer – are paying more and more to work in Saudi Arabia. Saleh from Ibb, Yemen, earns 1,500 riyals, almost 400 euros, per month. He works as a cook and runs a roadside restaurant near Dahran al-Janub, in the deep south of Saudi Arabia, near Yemen. „But I also have to do my iqama, my work permit, from paying. It now costs 3,000 riyals per year.” That’s two months’ salary.

job seekers

Working in Saudi Arabia is still better than working in Yemen, but it is becoming less lucrative. Under the leadership of 38-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – MbS for short – the new Saudi Arabia has been highly regulating the labor market since 2017, with steadily increasing taxes on expats.

That is out of necessity. An army of young Saudis is waiting for work. Two thirds of the population is younger than Prince MbS. While the loyalty of previous generations was bought off with lucrative government jobs, the numbers of job seekers are now much too high.

In addition to making visas and work permits more expensive, the government is using a color-coded system to force employers to recruit Saudi personnel. The Dutchman Paul van Schaik, personnel manager of the Saudi dairy company Sadafco, receives a new color overview every new working week, which relates to the composition of his company. “Early Sunday morning. Usually green, but sometimes a bit red. Then we will pull out all the stops.”

Red means: quota not met, so increasing levies. Everything goes cheaper, faster and easier with green, says the intermediary between Van Schaik and the government – ​​indispensable in Saudi Arabia. He doesn’t want his name in the paper. “With green you have all kinds of advantages. Then you get visas faster, for example, sometimes within 24 hours,” says the intermediary. “Two thirds of this country is made up of young people. They need a house, want to get married. We have to take care of that. They trickle into our company. Their share will never be 100 percent, but maybe 75.”

Sadafco – three thousand employees, fifty nationalities – is now at 38 percent Saudi employees. It was a quarter of Van Schaik’s arrival in 2011. “Welcome to Saudi, my boss said at the time, when I asked: where are the Saudis? Since MbS took office in 2017, things have really taken off.”

Within Sadafco, Van Schaik is also called Mr. Saudi because he so identifies with the country. He is in favor of MbS’s labor market policy. “Fifty years ago there was nothing in this country, now we are at the stage where the expats have helped us enough and we have to hold up our own pants.”

Shopping centres

All government jobs and representative positions—receptionists, janitors, security personnel, tourism—in the private sector now require 100 percent of the workforce to be Saudi. Just like the wait staff of the shopping malls that are widespread in the Arab world.

In Jeddah’s huge Mall of Arabia, the transformation is almost complete, says manager Ibrahim, of sports store chain Decathlon. “I only hire Saudi personnel. We’ve been generous all these years, but now we’ve got the unemployed, so I totally agree. And younger Saudis love to work.”

Hotel chain Sheraton also has an increasing number of Saudi staff, says Edwin Wijkhuys, the Dutch director. When he launched Vision 2030 – the long-term plan of which the rules on the labor market are part – he saw mainly skepticism. “No one saw it. How are we going to do this, Saudis said. They do not want. They come for a week and then leave. But actually it is 100 percent not that bad.”

Women are completely happy, because they were at home. Now they can go to work with their own car

Edwin Wijkhuys director of Sheraton hotels

Sheraton – with almost three hundred employees from all over the world – is now at 42% Saudi staff. “It has many practical advantages. Local staff may be slightly more expensive, but we don’t have to provide accommodation and food, they just go home. On balance, the costs are about the same.”

And so the Saudi labor market is rapidly changing to that of a modern economy. Wijkhuys likes to work with Saudi personnel. “They work well, the young generation is enthusiastic, and always on time. More and more local people are also working in the kitchen, which means we get more local dishes. So there are really only advantages. Women are completely happy, because they were at home. Now they can go to work in their own car.”

Old men

Sheraton employee Nora Khalid, 27, wanted to leave school early to go to work. “Back then it was still difficult to get a job, many women were at home. My grandfather didn’t like it at first. Now that he sees women working everywhere and reads and hears that it is safe, he is completely happy with it. So even those old men are behind it. It makes me proud. Please write that Saudi Arabia is not a sandbox. It’s so much more diverse than that. It is also much freer now. We used to often go to Morocco – I’m half Moroccan – I felt more free there. But that is no longer necessary.”

For some older Saudis, the pace of change is a little too fast. Abid al Sharif is walking around in the old center of Jeddah and wants to express his opinion. He thinks it’s very good that women work, he says. But not in all professions. “Women are not suited for everything. Take truck driver, or occupations at night. No, sometimes someone wants something that you have to protect them from. Women eventually want to start a family, you have to enable them to do that. I also don’t want to come home to an empty house.”

Paul van Schaik, of Sadafco, is full of praise for the no-nonsense policy of the Saudi government, which regularly issues new, progressive rules. “Everything changes every day. Every day! That is why it is so nice to work here, because things are done. No poldering.”

Van Schaik has been working for years to find a successor for his position, which according to the rules should actually be filled by a Saudi. “Candidates do not pass the assessment, or are unaffordable. People would rather go into government service, you were always there. But the time when people just get money without doing anything for it is over here too.”

For the legion of guest workers with simpler work, the downside is real: losing a job and returning home. Saudi newspapers invariably report the number of people – an average of 14,000 a week – who have been evicted because their iqama has expired. More than a million guest workers have left Saudi Arabia since 2018, according to formal figures.

But simply sending them away is not an option, says Edwin Wijkhuys of Sheraton: “We do warn people that it will happen, that a job must be guaranteed to be local. Someone at management level has to see and anticipate it, just like I have to do it myself. That’s different from someone at the laundromat. We will help them.”