KUWAIT: The interior ministry’s trilateral committee’s latest moves to deal with unskilled workers and visa traders resulted in the arrest of around 10,000 violators of residency and labor laws. In cooperation with residency affairs detectives, all violators were deported within three months, with around 3,000 of them arrested last month. The raids targeted masseurs, fishermen, farmers and scrap workers.

The trilateral committee affirmed its continuation of pursuing violators in the labor market, including in the fields of construction and farming, as 600 violators were caught in the past month and the beginning of this month during the camping season. The committee indicated some agencies are selling visas for more than KD 2,000 to some nationalities, stressing that some of these fake companies have been busted lately.

Meanwhile, the Public Authority of Manpower will introduce a new mechanism to receive complaints with regards to transfers between companies, particularly of new workers entering the country. The mechanism aims at confronting purchasing of visas by workers before arriving in Kuwait and their getting an actual job by transferring from a bogus company which increases the number of complaints and encourage residency purchase.

The mechanism aims to confront buying of residencies by workers before they come to Kuwait, especially those who upon their arrival in the country and obtaining actual work request a transfer from the fictitious company in which they are registered to the new company, which increases the volume of complaints and encourages the buying of residencies. This step comes within Kuwait’s moves to organize the process of recruiting workers of all nationalities and focus on those with specializations and who are needed in implementing government or private contracts.