Exporting labour services: a necessity against unemployment and social and political tension

By: Omar Shaban

Many densely populated states, and those suffering high unemployment rates, resort — for the local market's inability to create sufficient work opportunities — to exporting the service of labour (encouraging their citizens' work abroad). Exporting labour, whether through sending some citizens abroad temporarily or permanently, yields many advantages, foremost: reducing the demand for work locally, lightening the social and political pressures unemployment causes, and increasing the remittances arriving to them, whether cash or goods, from their citizens working abroad.

Many states rely on financial remittances as an important source for feeding the general budget with foreign currency, strengthening economic activity and the movement of buying and selling, raising the rates of bank and household saving, and encouraging investment. Remittances, whether cash or in kind, are those funds and goods that workers abroad send to their original countries.

In past decades, the remittances of Palestinians working in the Gulf states, in the Israeli market, and in other work areas to their families in Palestine formed one of the most important sources of Palestinian gross national income, and in empowering their families and stimulating the movement of the market, consumption, and investment. But with Iraq's entry into Kuwait in 1990 and what followed of the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinian families from the Arab Gulf generally and Kuwait especially, and the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000, which greatly shrank the number of workers working in the Israeli labour market — Palestinian society, modest in its size and means, lost one of its most important sources.

In a recent study issued by the United Nations population organisation, the number of those working, whether temporarily or permanently, outside their home countries around the world reached about 200 million people, obtaining yearly revenues worth three trillion dollars (3,000 billion dollars), of which 15% (half a trillion dollars) is transferred to their original countries.

Some Arab states seize an important share of these remittances — for example: Egypt 17 billion dollars, Morocco 7 billion, Jordan 5 billion, Lebanon 7 billion, Yemen 4 billion, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip about 2 billion dollars. At the international level, Mexico occupies first place in the value of remittances, at a value reaching 24 billion dollars yearly, followed by China with 18 billion and India with 11 billion dollars.

While exporting the service of labour abroad yields many advantages — such as gaining new experience and cultures, representing the workers' countries in the states receiving them, lightening the demand for jobs in their countries, and strengthening tourism and the operation of local and international airlines to and from them — it carries negative repercussions, among them: depriving their countries of their experience, causing social and family problems at times, and the exporting states being forced to accommodate and curry favour with the states receiving their citizens, as happens between the Gulf states and certain Arab states; and other negative repercussions.

For the importance of remittances, whether to the general budget or to society itself as individuals and institutions, for the labour-exporting states, as well as the receiving states' need for them, the two sides have resorted to institutionalising and organising the labour market between them through what is called the “secondment or delegation system” — in what achieves fairness of selection among those wishing to work abroad and reduces the repercussions of the departure of thousands of competences on the local market; as well as giving guarantees to the receiving states that the labour coming to them will be useful elements for them and will not cause political, social, or security problems, amid the increase of the risks of terrorist operations and the speed of their movement across borders.

On the Palestinian plane: according to a study issued by the United Nations population fund, the population in the Palestinian territories is expected to grow from 4.7 million people currently to 6.9 million in 2030 and to 9.5 million people in 2050. Until 2030 the size of the workforce will increase from 1.3 million people currently to 2.3 million people in 2030 and to about 4 million in 2050.

Under the pressures the Palestinian economy and society suffer from the catastrophic rise of unemployment rates currently, especially among new graduates — taking into account the small size of the Palestinian economy and the prospects of growth, which will remain limited — it will not be able to absorb the tens of thousands of new graduates yearly. Therefore there is no escape from exporting the service of Palestinian labour abroad to face the catastrophe of unemployment now and in the future.

Therefore work must proceed immediately on the signing of official agreements by the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian universities, and the vocational-training centres with other states in need of the workforce in all its kinds, to absorb the thousands of the unemployed now or in the future in Palestine. Whatever development happens to the Palestinian labour market, whether under the occupation or after its passing, it will not be able to face the requirements of population growth in the future. And because unemployment is the source of all evils, serious and fruitful work is the guarantor of solving the dozens of crises and social illnesses that follow from it.