Jordan’s garment sector offers more benefits to guest workers — report

AMMAN – Jordan’s garment sector offers thousands of job opportunities but the benefits are more attractive to guest workers than to Jordanians, according to an official report. 

The study, released recently by the National Centre for Human Resources Development (NCHRD), found that demand for jobs by employers in the sector outweighs supply of workers with over 15,000 employment opportunities available in the coming two years.

The report said that between 2011 and 2013, textile manufacturers offered a total of 19,657 job opportunities, to which only 4,251 people applied. This created a gap of 15,406 jobs needed in factories across the Kingdom. 

The market still needs to fill these jobs by 2016, said the NCHRD report, which was sent to The Jordan Times. 

Ala Bashayreh, labour market specialist at NCHRD, explained to The Jordan Times that Jordanians are reluctant to apply for jobs in the textile industry for reasons related to certain laws and the work environment.

For example, Labour Ministry regulations compel garment factories to offer health insurance and housing to foreign workers, while it is not obligatory to offer such benefits to Jordanians, according to Bashayreh. 

“This needs to be amended as the local workforce should be offered health insurance,” she noted, adding that guest workers are more productive than Jordanians because they can work two shifts to get higher salaries, “but Jordanians can’t”.

Foreigners can work everywhere because they know that the factory will provide housing but Jordanians can’t due to cultural reasons and transportation difficulties, she noted. 

Bashayreh, who led the team that prepared the study, said some of the jobs available for the coming years would be temporary for some months. 

Factories sometimes receive large manufacturing orders so they hire more employees temporarily to meet delivery dates, the specialist said. 

Another issue that makes job offers more attractive for foreigners, she said, is that most of the employment opportunities target female workers. 

“Jordanian families refuse to send their daughters to work in factories that are far from their residence; in addition they don’t like the work environment at garment factories,” Bashayreh explained, noting that most women labourers in the industry are foreigners. 

Even when Jordanian women agree to work for garment factories, work places lack crèches, she said, adding that new laws should be drafted to force employers to provide daycare services for the children of married workers in order to encourage more Jordanians to work in place of foreigners.

Article 72 of the Labour Law requires companies that have 20 or more female employees with a total of 10 children under the age of four to provide an adequate daycare centre supervised by trained personnel.

But activists say more efforts are needed to enforce this article.