A massive campaign, which was started recently on Twitter by many Saudis demanding increase in salaries, is gathering momentum on its own. The campaign saying that salaries are not enough is growing to such an extent that it has reached a global level. I have been following this Hashtag on Twitter on a daily basis and on occasions participated in it with few comments of my own. Many of the Saudis voicing their concerns are saying that salaries are not enough anymore. Many people on the hashtags and many people I know are claiming that the current salaries are finished by the middle of the month and that they barely make ends meet. Expatriates living in the Kingdom are also feeling the heat and are also affected like the Saudis. And like the Saudis they are, on occasions, forced to work two jobs to be able to afford the minimum standard of living. One thing I know for sure is that there is a crazy price increase everywhere. The price of some commodities have doubled and sometimes even tripled, of course under the watchful eyes of the Ministry of Commerce, which is doing absolutely nothing. Of course, the role of the consumer protection society simply does not exist. A very simple example is the recent hike in the price of a box of tomatoes. A friend of mine told me that the price kept increasing from SR9 per box to SR15 and now it is above SR30. Who can afford it? I am more concerned about Saudis and expatriates with salaries below SR4,000 a month. I wonder, how do they live? How to they pay rent? How do they buy food and groceries? How do they pay their debts? Do they eat like us? Or do they eat at all? I sometimes wonder how would a Saudi starting his life in the job market would be able to live decently and hope for a rosy future if his salary is below SR6,000 a month? A simple Saudi believes in the free market, yet many of them believe that any price increase is not due to the law of supply and demand. It has to do with the extreme greed of Saudi businessmen, who tend from time to time to increase their prices in search for sumptuous profit for themselves. Many sometimes say that the prices of a slew of materials are being increased by businessmen despite the fact that there are no buyers for them. The people know that they have increased the price only because the Ministry of Commerce is in deep slumber. Then, who would stop businessmen from increasing prices? No one. One might say that in a free market people can switch to other products when someone increases their prices. The problem in Saudi Arabia is that all businessmen act in unison and the increase in their prices is done collectively. The best examples of this are the car dealers in the Kingdom. Despite a global decline in car prices following the crisis in the car industry with sales plummeting, prices in Kingdom did not drop at all. As a matter of fact it has kept on soaring. Government officials should take a tough stand against this madness. We have suffered a lot this Ramadan with price increases everywhere. What are we going to do during Eid? Even worse, how are we going to afford school expenses after Eid? Things are not looking good. I am, however, not in favor of a salary increase for one reason. Every time there is a salary increase, prices triple. There is no need to increase salaries unless there are guarantees that prices are not going to increase. I remember the previous occasion when there was a 15 percent salary increase for all government employees a few years back. Prices simply jumped after the salary increase. We, in the private sector, suffered because the only increase we felt was the price increase. The impact of the price hike was made evident in a comparative study — that is being circulated — comparing prices in 1982 with 2011. The price of renting a three-bedroom house has increased by 1000 percent from SR2,500 a year in 1982 to SR25,000 in 2011. The price of a 10-kilo bag of sugar increased by 550 percent from SR5 in 1982 to SR44 in 2011. The price of a goat increased by 550 percent from SR400 in 1982 to SR2,300 in 2011. The study went on to compare prices of many other commodities and the conclusion it arrived at was the average percentage of price increase from 1982 to 2011 is 765 percent, while the difference in salaries from 1982 to 2011 is 66 percent. A clear indication that salary hikes have not kept pace with the price hikes. The answer to the problem is not salary increase if that is going to harm the government's budget. What we really want is for the government to take to task businessmen who are unjustly increasing prices and in the process harming people. We need a more active role from the Ministry of Commerce and the consumer protection departments. They should punish those playing with prices. Only then, when prices are back to normal, will anybody won't be asking for salary increase, and we will not see people saying that their salaries are not enough. – The writer can be reached at [email protected]
