Minister calls for focus on skills

Dubai: Relying on cheap unskilled labour is no longer in line with the UAE's vision for future growth and the country must tackle problems of education and improving Emiratis' skills to compete in the global economy, said UAE Labour Minister Saqr Gobash Saeed Gobash at the Cost of Labour workshop yesterday.

The central question was how to unify the understanding of economic development to achieve the government's vision: creating a knowledge-based and diverse economy that has greater Emirati contributions and attracts the best talent, he added.

The real estate development — as a service that the UAE provides — contradicts comprehensive development, said Dr Ahmad Saif Belhasa, Chairman of Belhasa Group of Companies and one of the panelists.

The UAE must focus training and education and tailor them to suit development needs, he said. Labour costs must also take into account political costs because they are decisive, said Dr Abdul Khaliq Abdullah, a political science professor at the UAE University.

The UAE is viciously attacked in various international reports for labour-related issues such as human trafficking — which are political costs that must be considered, he noted.

Discussing labour policies has to include a discussion of development strategies: "You fix one to fix the other," he said. "We are building an economy bigger than our capacity, our wants, our needs, but it will exhaust us and then we'll have to give it over to others," he warned.

Strategies

Any development strategies that the UAE builds must be based on its competitive edge, natural resources, and production capacity, said Shaikh Khalid Bin Zayed Bin Saqr Al Nahyan, head of the executive council at the Dubai Economic Council.

The UAE has witnessed economic growth but not economic development, noted Dr Nassir Bin Gaith, a professor at the Sorbonne, in Abu Dhabi.

This is because demographic growth led to economic growth — the opposite of the trend where economies flourish and then population expands, he said.

He said the right starting point was talking about labour issues in the language that all people can relate to — wages, profits, loss — rather than only discuss the impact on national identity.

Assessing objectives

Dr Ahmad Saif Belhasa, Chairman of Contractor's Association, said the government needs to clarify its sustainable development plan and reassess its objectives before introducing any change to its labour policies.

"It is about time to ask ourselves what we have benefited from the previous extraordinary rate of growth and do we really need to continue growing and importing more people to work here. Do we tend to solve the problem of unemployment hitting other nations and to suffer as a result to this?" he asked.

Belhassa said the UAE needs to rationalise its current rate of population growth.

"We will not be able to compete with China and India. Egypt and Iran cannot compete with them. We need to determine first where we need ourselves to be and what tools available for us to meet our targets. We might need to revamp of our educational system, need to focus on certain kinds of industries rather than opening our country to import the raw materials and the workforce and then subsidise them. The Dh50 billion subsidy on workers reflected in the study published in this workshop is shocking and should encourage us to reassess our objectives," he said.