Glancing through the newspapers one morning last month Saudi Arabian businessman Ihsan al-Naeem was stunned by a government announcement that he fears will threaten the survival of his family's 30-year-old contracting business.
In the latest and most aggressive of a series of labour reforms, the government has started imposing fees on companies that hire more foreign than local workers. The requirement covers everyone from expat professionals to hospital workers and labourers on construction sites and is in addition to quotas already in place to limit foreign staff numbers.
The new rule is aimed at reducing unemployment of 10.5 percent among Saudi nationals by getting them into jobs now performed by 8 million expatriates in the country, a long-term Saudi goal given fresh impetus by the uprisings in Arab countries last year that were partly driven by high unemployment.
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