Migrant labor has become part of economic life in a globalizing Middle East, with countries increasingly dependent on workers hailing from across borders and often from outside the region. Yet, with unemployment buffeting many Arab economies, the issue of migrant laborers is becoming increasingly contentious.
The unemployment rate across the Middle East will rise to 11 percent this year, according to the International Labor Organization, and the typical reaction of governments in crises is to restrict the movement of labor to keep foreign workers out. However, other forces are also at work restricting labor flows into and out of the region as well as within it. In particular, the last few years have seen a general trend towards labor market regulation, made possible by more efficient computerized public sectors, and rendered necessary by government fears over internal security. As 2009 draws to a close, these trends have combined to impose more restrictions on guest workers.
Jordan is a case in point. The kingdom’s economy relies heavily on Egyptians and other foreign workers, and in some areas the presence of this imported labor is crucial (for example, with Egyptians working in agriculture, Pakistanis in garment production, as well as Indonesians and Sri Lankans in domestic service). In turn, workers remit much needed funds to their homelands. However, the influx of migrants is becoming subject to more serious Jordanian state scrutiny.
Jordan’s (and sending-countries’) attempts to regulate the kingdom’s migrant workers started before the global financial crisis, with a major catalyst for increased Jordanian state surveillance of foreigners being the triple-hotel bombing in Amman in November 2005 that killed some 60 people and injured more than 100. Yet the issue of migrant labor has clearly become more contentious over the past few months. Jordan’s jobless rate is now back up to 13 percent after having fallen in the past few years, further challenging the status of migrant workers and accelerating the trend towards more government control in this regard. In fact, the question of guest workers had been on the state agenda for over a decade, but only in 2007 did Jordan try more seriously to regulate entry of workers from outside the kingdom bilaterally, as opposed to previous steps taken on a unilateral basis towards foreign workers by Amman.
In other words, Jordan’s current policy is to enlist the aid of foreign governments to keep the flow of their nationals into the kingdom under control. To that end, two years ago Jordan signed memoranda with Egypt, Sri Lanka and Pakistan respectively to regulate the entry of workers into the country. Under the agreement between Jordan and Egypt, the number of Egyptian laborers would be regulated and the sectors they can work in specified. Laborers coming into the kingdom from Egypt have to meet Jordanian requirements such as passing medical tests, holding certificates appropriate to their field of work and certifying that they have no criminal records.
This tightening up led to guest workers being deported for violating work permits and residency regulations. Some 318,000 non-Jordanian laborers held valid work permits by mid-2008, while that number had dropped to 304,000 by the end of last year, partly as a result of the expulsion of more than 10,000 migrant workers (most of them Egyptians).
Yet much work is still needed to organize the kingdom’s guest worker sector. The Jordanian government estimates that about 450,000 workers of different nationalities are currently employed in the kingdom (of whom around 300,000 are Arabs, mainly Egyptian) though only about two-thirds of these have work permits. Thus the process of legitimizing guest workers continues, and well more than 110,000 Egyptians have applied to work in Jordan in the two years since the Amman-Cairo labor agreement. (Under the memorandum of understanding, which was only finalized this year, Egypt is also required to keep a database of all laborers seeking employment in Jordan to be made accessible to all concerned parties.)
So far so good; however, news regarding guest workers coming to Jordan from other states is not as encouraging. For example, though agreements signed by Amman with Sri Lanka and Pakistan respectively seek to regulate workers’ entry from those countries while also guaranteeing them decent working conditions, there continue to be problems with laborers from these and other South Asian nationalities. This has particularly been the case in Jordan’s garment production sector, which is contracting in the face of foreign competition, with foreign workers who produce the clothing often feeling the pinch in unpaid salaries. Despite this, Egyptian laborers, Jordan’s largest guest-worker contingent, are well on their way to being regularized — an important step to stabilize labor markets in these times of rising unemployment.
RIAD EL-KHOURI is the senior associate consultant at the William Davidson Institute of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and dean of the business school at the Lebanese French University in Erbil
