The Nitaqat Program has placed 80 percent of private companies in the Red zone of the Nitaqat program. This has resulted in some companies paying Saudi jobseekers to stay at home so that these companies can increase their Saudization quotas, according to Muhammad Barman, a member of the Contracting Committee at the Eastern Province Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He said this is contrary to the repeated assertions by Adel Fakieh, Minister of Labor, that most companies fall in the Green category. Barman said there are pharmacies, polyclinics and contracting companies in the Red zone which have been forced to pay salaries to Saudi jobseekers while they are at home. “One of the largest sectors affected by this program is the contracting sector because of the unwillingness of Saudi jobseekers to work in these tough occupations.” He claimed the ministry adopted the Nitaqat program without seeking the views of the private sector and said this “neglect is unjustifiable”. He said the ministry is now putting great pressure without providing a database indicating the number of the jobseekers or the jobs it wants to nationalize. He criticized the ministry for using the database of the Ministry of Interior and the General Organization of Social Insurance (GOSI). He also urged the ministry to give the private sector a longer grace period to correct their status instead of the current three months. Salman Al-Jashi, a member of the Board of Directors of the Eastern Province Chamber of Commerce and Industry, praised the program and said it was transparent. He said companies can determine their status by simply checking the ministry's website. He said it was too early to judge the program because it would take six months to determine the actual percentage of unemployment in the Kingdom. __
