NO HOME WORK: ARMENIA TO SIGN AGREEMENTS LEGITIMIZING/RECRUITING ARMENIAN LABOR FORCE IN UAE AND QATAR
By Siranuysh Gevorgyan
ArmeniaNow
23.09.11 | 11:15
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Romik Matchkalyan
The Governments of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Armenia
have recently passed decrees approving the idea of using Armenian
manpower in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The agreements
are expected to be signed by the end of the year.
Deputy Premier of Armenia, Armen Gevorgyan who is also territorial
administration minister, stated at a recent government session that
Armenian citizens work in those countries regardless of whether the
government likes it or not, so the purpose of signing such agreements
is to regulate their activities.
“Every company finds a way to enroll and employ the personnel they
need, so the issue now is to make that process more organized. There
won’t be permanent residency or citizenship issues, considering the
specifics of those countries. We are not encouraging migration,
but rather regulating the existing labor migration processes and
activities,” he said.
Romik Matchkalyan, a 53-year-old pilot, who has just returned
to Yerevan from Dubai, told ArmeniaNow that he is satisfied with
the working conditions offered there. Matchkalyan flies cargo to
neighboring countries. Before, he was a professor at Yerevan’s aviation
academy where he taught air navigation and aviation legislation. He
says that, although he enjoyed working with students, he gave
preference to hard night work in hot Dubai (technical characteristics
of his IL-76 aircraft make it impossible to fly in the daytime),
away from his family, since the salary here was very low. He has
signed a one-year contract, according to which he works three months
and if off two.
“I had no desire to leave here [Armenia], however, but I had to. My
salary there is ten times the one I was getting here, plus the living
conditions,” says the pilot, whose employer has provided him with
five-star hotel accommodation with all its facilities and full-board
included.
He says, however, that even without state agreements, he is quite
well protected by his employment contract.
Gagik Yeganyan, heading the state migration service at the ministry of
territorial administration, says that when the state agreements are
signed, information on available vacancies will be sent to Yerevan,
and then professionals in the proper fields from those countries
would interview Armenian job-seekers in Yerevan.
Yeganyan says that it would be available only to highly
qualified professionals: doctors, engineers, IT specialists,
construction-engineers, etc. He assures that attractive conditions
would be offered to Armenian professionals in Qatar and UAE, with
salaries even higher than what’s commonly paid in European states.
While the government assures that this would not trigger migration,
and that this is only temporary labor migration, public figures
and politicians that have repeatedly raised the issue of alarming
migration trends, express their concerns.
According to the state migration service data, 67,000 people have left
Armenia this year and have not yet returned; however, the service
doesn’t want to rush and call it migration, since the majority of
them are labor migrants and will return, they believe, by the end of
the year.
Governance specialist Harutyun Mesrobyan told ArmeniaNow that signing
such agreements means that Armenia continues to be a “poor quality
state”.
“It means that the government cannot provide proper employment to
qualified personnel so that they don’t have to leave the country,”
says Mesrobyan, who believes that the only solution to the issue is
in uprooting the oligarchic economy. “When the competition field
is free, and the state takes up reforms of infrastructures, tax,
legislative and other fields, there will be no migration.”
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