Economics
A Ghost Army of Workers Is Paid to Do Nothing in the Gulf
- Public payrolls are swollen by jobs that are more like welfare
- But cuts could break tacit deal with citizens, and spur unrest
Photographer: Yasser al-Zayyat/AFP via Getty Images
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Show up, swipe in. The routine is familiar to office workers everywhere. In Kuwait, it proved too much to ask.
The government was trying to trim a wage bill that eats up more than half its budget -- an outlandish share even by Gulf standards. Last year, it required public employees to swipe their fingers on a biometric reader every morning. The following quarter, about 5,000 quit. Many of them rarely, if ever, turned up, and were worried they’d get caught under the new rule, according to Khalifa Hamada, the undersecretary at Kuwait’s Finance Ministry.