More than 40,000 UAE nationals of working age are jobless, taking the unemployment rate to its highest level since the country was founded 38 years ago, said an employment official.
Abdullah Al Awadi, a consultant at the National Human Resources Development and Recruitment Authority (Tanmia), said the surge in the local unemployment rate was a result of a continuous influx of expatriate labour and obstacles in the implementation of job nationalisation plans.
"The UAE society, like other Gulf societies is suffering from an unemployment crisis that is moving in an upward line," he said in an article published by the Abu Dhabi-based Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research.
His figures showed the unemployment rate among UAE nationals peaked at 13 per cent at the end of 2008. "This means that the number of UAE national job seekers has broken the 40,000-mark for the first time since the country was founded… in the past, unemployment rates ranged between three and six per cent, almost equivalent to Gulf and global levels."
Awadi said job nationalisation is still far lagging behind targets in both the public and private sectors, with the ratio of national workforce in the public sector stabilising at around 44 per cent through 2008.
He said the level is low considering what he described a series of government laws and decisions to raise that percentage.
"This situation is mainly because of an influx of expatriates to the UAE… If the policy of recruitment in the public sector remains as it is, then it will be very difficult to achieve a balance between the national and expatriate labour in the public sector in the future," he said.
Awadi said that despite the numerous institutions created by the UAE to tackle such a problem, the results "appear negative at the end of every year". He said: "This problem has started to convince us that there is a sort of imbalance or a legal gap… it could also be a lack of coordination among those institutions.
"The problem is that such negative results emerge amid compelling government decisions to the private sector to raise the number of national workers."
He referred to existing government rules forcing the banking sector to have a minimum four per cent local manpower and the insurance sector for a five per cent. For the private sector as a whole, the percentage is set at two per cent.
"Despite these modest requirements for national workforce as the government believes in a step-by-step policy, the results have remained far below ambition nearly a decade after those legislations were issued," he said. "Such results make us believe that the work environment in the local market is repulsive rather than attractive for citizens.
"The concerned institutions could conduct field studies on hundreds of national graduates who have left their jobs just after a few months to verify such a fact… these institutions should then study such problems seriously and present their outcome to the government so that it can resolve this riddle and find real solutions."
In a recent survey, the Ministry of Economy put the total unemployment rate in the UAE at just four per cent but said the rate among nationals far exceeds that among expatriates because of the low level of national workers in the private sector. It noted that nationals still prefer the public sector for more job benefits.
The report showed that unemployment rate among UAE citizens was as high as 13.8 per cent while that in expatriates was only 2.6 per cent.
Keep up with the latest business news from the region with the daily Emirates Business 24|7 newsletter. To subscribe to the newsletter, please click here.