Help Wanted

Getting housecleaning help in Kuwait has become expensive, and also exploitative. After new residency restrictions forced many foreign workers to leave the country, critics claim that the Kuwaiti domestic labor market has become a virtual “slave trade.” Illegal recruitment offices have reportedly popped up to shuffle nearly 60,000 unregistered domestic workers between Kuwaiti households at costs that can reach nearly 400KD, or more than $1,300 per house. Less than half of that fee makes its way to the workers.

The labor problems don’t stop there. Kuwaiti farmers complain that production costs are soaring because workers are scarce, pushing up wages. The head of the Kuwaiti farmers’ union estimated that each of Kuwait’s more than 4,000 farms need 30 laborers  but struggle to find half of that.

In the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, the Kuwaiti government has been pushing for the rapid “Kuwaitization” of the country’s workforce, intensifying earlier efforts to replace all expatriates working in the public sector with Kuwaitis by 2021 and expanding them across sectors.

In June, Kuwait’s prime minister proposed reducing the number of all foreign workers in the country from 70 percent to 30 percent of the total population. In July, parliament approved a spate of laws changing expatriate residency status, capping the number of Indian and Egyptian workers at 15 percent of the total population and revoking residency permits for non-skilled laborers over 60. The Kuwaiti cabinet shot down the plan to cap the percentage of foreign workers, but parliament took up the matter again in October. Government scrutiny of the topic has been driving the private sector. Kuwaiti companies have been quietly cutting the number of foreign workers employed or just cutting their foreign employees’ wages all together, leaving them stranded without pay and forcing them to return home.

In November, Kuwaiti newspapers reported that the number of expatriates holding legal residency in Kuwait fell from 3.3 million in March to 2.65 million by late-2020.

Kuwait’s government might have realized that it moved too fast. On December 7, the country began to allow as many as 600 expatriate domestic workers  holding valid residency to return per day—and the government has plans to expand the program to other sectors facing labor shortfalls.

With an estimated 500,000 expatriates pushed out of the country by the end of 2020, the Kuwaiti government might find a shortage of workers ready to come back.

This article is part of the CSIS Middle East Program series Mezze: Assorted Stories from the Middle East.