Angry Saudi soccer clubs pinpoint Gulf labour market contradictions

By James M. Dorsey

Mounting anger among Saudi soccer clubs at their subjugation to quotas designed to encourage employment of Saudi nationals and reduce dependence on foreign labour illustrates problems encountered by wealthy Gulf countries in balancing the contradictory demands of labour markets, often lopsided demographics, social contracts involving a cradle-to-grave welfare state that creates unrealistic employment expectations, and organizations’ need to hire personnel on the basis of nationality rather than merit.

The clubs, many of which are owned by members and associates of the ruling Al Saud family but publicly funded, warned that a Labour Ministry decision to include them in a quota system intended to force the private sector to hire a larger number of Saudi nationals could disadvantage them by preventing them from hiring foreign talent.

The clubs’ complaint mirrors problems across the Gulf with government efforts to encourage preferential employment of nationals. The complaint is particularly stark given that the kingdom unlike smaller Gulf states like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates still boasts a population in which nationals constitute a majority, if only a slim one. Qataris, for example, account for a mere six percent of the Qatari labour market, making the country wholly dependent on foreign labour with no prospect of altering the market balance.

As a result, labour quota systems may encourage nationals to consider a wider range of employment opportunities but are unlikely to resolve the underlying demographic problem. The quotas also at times force organizations to hire nationals who may be less qualified or motivated than foreigners – a concern among football clubs where foreign talent plays a key role. The problem of Saudi clubs is compounded by the kingdom’s reluctance to encourage Saudi players to garner experience by playing abroad for foreign clubs.

The anger of Saudi clubs at the Labour Ministry decision comes moreover at a time that Gulf states with Qatar and the UAE in the lead are under mounting pressure to abolish restrictive labour systems that put foreign employees at the mercy of their employers. Human rights and trade union activists, who originally targeted Qatar after its winning in 2010 of a bid to host the 2022 World Cup, have in recent months expanded their campaign to include various Gulf states.

In contrast to world soccer body FIFA president Sepp Blatter who this week denied that his group was accountable for the welfare of migrant labour in Qatar, International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) vice president Sebastian Coe said his group would hold Qatar responsible for human and labour rights. The IAAF last month awarded Qatar the 2019 athletics world championship.

“I recognise that there are political implications about taking sport into different environments and with that falls responsibility to international federations. Labour conditions and how your event is delivered are very important issues for federations and particularly for young people. And if we are engaging with young people, they sit at the moral hotspots of all those big global issues and it is absolutely essential sport confronts them,” Mr. Coe told a news conference in London.

His remarks were in line with a growing willingness in sports driven by International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach to make human rights a criterion for the awarding of hosting rights for mega sports events.

The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman – agreed earlier this week on measures to improve the working and living conditions of migrant workers in a bid to fend off more far-reaching demands by human rights and trade union activists, including the abolition of the restrictive kafala or sponsorship system and the right to organize freely.

An estimated 15 million migrant workers of which a majority hail from Asia are employed in the Gulf. Foreigners account for almost half of the GCC’s total population of 50 million.

The Saudi clubs, in an environment in which demographics is a sensitive subject that is only cautiously if at all discussed publicly and in which parties are reluctant to publicly criticize a policy that is projected as a national initiative, have framed their criticism of the labour ministry decision in terms of their classification as private sector employers.

“The ministry has not classified us appropriately and is treating us as part of the private sector. We are obliged to hire Saudis just to stay away from the red category (that indicates failure to meet the Saudization quota). We are incapable of helping the Saudization effort as we are in need of foreigners,” the Saudi Gazette quoted Al-Salam FC president Fadil Al-Nimr as saying.

To bolster their objection to being classified as private enterprises, soccer club executives argued that their budgets were funded and supervised by the kingdom’s General Presidency of Youth Welfare (GPYF) that is responsible for sports in the country and is headed by a member of the ruling family.
“We are not a profitable organization to be treated like private companies. We are under constricted budgets allocated by the government to serve the country,” the head of Ittifaq FC, Abdulaziz Al-Dowsari told the Gazette.

The club’s spokesmen, Adnan Al-Muaibid, added that the club’s legal arrangements, budget and administration were the responsibility of the GPYF. “We should not be included in Nitaqat (quota) program. Its conditions do not apply to us and is restricting our athletic and financial status. We will challenge the decision and we are currently trying to deliver our opinions to the ministry,” Mr. Al-Muaibid said.

Unwittingly, the executives’ opposition to the quota system highlighted tight government control of soccer in the kingdom and much of the rest of the Middle East and North Africa despite efforts by FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) to maintain the fiction of a separation of sports and politics.

Saudi Arabia has long had a complex relationship with the sport that evokes passions similar to those sparked by religion and social issues and was only legalized in the kingdom in 1951. Saudi authorities recently considered emphasizing individual rather than team sports in drafting the kingdom’s five-year, men-only national sports plan, but ultimately backed away from the suggestion because of soccer’s immense popularity. Saudi clerics rolled out mobile mosques during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa in an effort to persuade fans gathered in cafes to watch matches to observe obligatory prayer times.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog and a forthcoming book with the same title.

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Defending the Predators: The Argument for the Killer Drone

This summer, while crossing the Boston Common, I came across an anti-drone protest. Out of curiosity I approached one of the protestors handing out anti-drone fliers decrying the fact that “99% of the people that die in the CIA’s robotic drone war in Pakistan are civilians.” The image the protestor painted for me was of Pakistani towns on fire as robotic drones, which resembled alien spaceships from War of the Worlds, clumsily killed innocent civilians.

Having been to the tribal zones in Pakistan where the deadly Predator and Reaper drones hunt Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists while doing research for my recent book on the subject, Predators: The CIA’s Drone War on al-Qaeda, I knew the protestors’ claims were wildly exaggerated. There was no way that the drones, which distantly circle over their targets for over 24 hours, monitoring their “pattern of life” movements with high-resolution cameras before firing GPS- or laser-guided mini-missiles at the enemy (who have also been monitored by spies and telephone intercepts), were engaged in the most uniquely imprecise bombing campaign in history. But wild claims by anti-drone activists dominate the conversation on drones, since the CIA and military have an official policy of not commenting on drone strikes. Average U.S. citizens cannot talk to drone pilots to find out whom they are killing based on what intelligence and why.

However, recently, at a conference on drones at Boston College, I got the extraordinary opportunity to do just that. I got to meet drone pilots and one general who controls drone operations and candidly discuss what it is like to follow human targets on the ground from cameras mounted on a drone flying two miles away and then kill them in an instant with Hellfire missiles. While one might expect the U.S.-based drone pilots who act as remote judge, jury and executioner to be cold-blooded, remorseless killers (their remotely piloted planes are called Reapers and Predators, after all), I found them to be incredibly thoughtful, introspective and deeply concerned about the notion of killing even one civilian bystander.

One Predator pilot told me that when you make your first kill, it shakes you to your core for several days, and that you never get used to it. The image of a human target you have been following closely on a camera being killed by your missile stays with you. Another drone pilot told me of an incident where he watched a known terrorist walk outside his house with children around him, causing the pilot to make the decision to hold off on killing the terrorist to avoid causing civilian “collateral damage.” All the pilots vehemently rejected the notion that the “robotic” drones (which are actually not Terminator-style robots, because humans control them) lead to a video-game mentality whereby pilots don’t see their targets as real humans. On the contrary, the hours spent surreptitiously spying on their targets through the lenses of high-resolution cameras allow the pilots to get to know their targets intimately in ways bomber pilots in the past could not. Killing their targets in this fashion is far more intimate and personal than traditional bombings by high-flying, supersonic bombers.

As for the claims by the anti-drone activists that the CIA’s separate drone campaign is more imprecise than, say, the firebombing of Dresden during World War II or the carpet bombing of Hanoi during the Vietnam War, my own research disproves this notion. The drone pilots are aided in their precision by such tactics as the use of homing beacons, which are secretly placed on Taliban targets’ cars.

Drone missiles are then fired and home in on these beacons on targets once the terrorists’ cars have been driven out of civilian-packed villages. As for the drone mini-missiles, including the new 21-inch Scorpion SSW (Small Smart Weapon), they are so small that they do not create large explosions of the sort created by, say, a traditional 2,000-pound “dumb bomb.” This means there is less of a chance that nearby bystanders will be accidentally killed by shrapnel in the small explosion radius. Such tactics help explain the unprecedented low civilian-to-militant kill ratios from drone strikes. According to the widely respected Long War Journal, there have been 2,706 Taliban and al-Qaeda militants killed in the drone campaign in Pakistan, at a cost of just 156 civilians.

As for the image painted for me by the drone protestors in the Boston Common that drones are flying over Pakistani cities clumsily killing civilians, the drone campaign takes place only in the remote tribal zones controlled by the Taliban. It is easy to find local tribal voices who support the drones strikes on the Taliban, who behead their maliks (elders), burn their schools, enforce harsh Shariah law, stone women, etc. The drones strike fear into the heart of the Taliban and effectively terrorize the terrorists far more than civilians who know the campaign is not targeting them.

In summary, then, I believe one needs to be skeptical when assessing the inflated civilian-death-toll claims of the anti-drone protestors. For all their fearsome names, the Predators and Reapers, while far from perfect, are engaged in perhaps the most precise, discriminating “bombing” (i.e., guided missile) campaign in history. If one accepts the fact that the U.S. and Pakistani governments cannot simply surrender to the terrorists, then the drones are the most humane solution to defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda cancer that threatens the U.S., Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Brian Glyn Williams is a professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and the author of The Last Warlord: The Life and Legend of Dostum, the Afghan Warrior Who Led U.S. Special Forces to Overthrow the Taliban Regime and Afghanistan Declassified: A Guide to America’s Longest War.

Rand Paul Thinks Taxes Are Partly To Blame For Eric Garner's Death

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) thinks the death of Eric Garner is symbolic of a much larger problem in American society: politicians levying taxes on things like cigarettes.

During an interview on MSNBC’s “Hardball” Wednesday evening, Paul said that it was hard to watch the video of Garner being put in a chokehold and not be “horrified.”

“But I think there’s something bigger than just the individual circumstances,” Paul said. “Obviously the individual circumstances are important, but I think it’s also important to know that some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes, so they’ve driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive.”

Paul went on to blame politicians for putting police in a position where they had to arrest someone for selling a loose cigarette.

“Some politician also had to direct the police to say, ‘Hey, we want you arresting people for selling a loose cigarette.’ And for someone to die over breaking that law, there really is no excuse for it,” Paul said. “But I do blame the politicians, we’ve put our police in a difficult situation with bad laws.”

Several other politicians expressed outrage over a grand jury’s decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, who placed Garner in the chokehold that led to his death this summer, as a matter of equal treatment under the law.

“We’re not just dealing with a problem in 2014, we’re not dealing with years of racism leading up to it, or decades of racism, we are dealing with centuries of racism that have brought us to this day. That is how profound the crisis is,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said on Wednesday.

President Barack Obama said on Wednesday that issues of mistrust between law enforcement and minority communities were “an American problem.”

“We are not going to let up until we see a strengthening of the trust and a strengthening of the accountability that exists between our communities and our law enforcement,” Obama said. “When anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law, that’s a problem.”

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Inside The Battle Over The CIA Torture Report

After months of internal wrangling, the Senate Intelligence Committee is finally set to release its report on President George W. Bush-era CIA practices, which among other details will contain information about foreign countries that aided in the secret detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.

'Hell No!': Eric Garner's Widow Rejects Officer's Apology Amid Shock Over Grand Jury's Decision

The family of Eric Garner addressed the nation Wednesday after a grand jury announced its decision not to indict an NYPD officer in Garner’s death.

Garner, a Staten Island man who had asthma, died on July 17 after Officer Daniel Pantaleo placed him in a prohibited police chokehold during an arrest. Police suspected Garner, who was black, of selling untaxed cigarettes on the sidewalk. The incident was captured on video, where Garner can be heard repeatedly telling officers “I can’t breathe!” before his body goes limp.

At a press conference Wednesday at the Harlem headquarters of the National Action Network, the advocacy group founded by Al Sharpton, Garner’s widow, Esaw Garner, and his mother, Gwen Carr, expressed their disappointment with the grand jury’s decision and their frustration that Pantaleo would not be held accountable by a court.

Esaw Garner became visibly angry when asked if she accepted the apology Pantaleo had issued earlier that day. In a statement, Pantaleo offered his condolences to the family and said he never intended to harm Garner.

“Hell no!” Garner replied. “The time for remorse would have been when my husband was yelling to breathe.”

“No, I don’t accept his apology. No, I could care less about his condolences,” she continued. “He’s still working. He’s still getting a paycheck. He’s still feeding his kids, when my husband is six feet under and I’m looking for a way to feed my kids now.”

“Who’s going to play Santa Claus for my grandkids this year?” she said. “Who’s going to play Santa Claus?”

Garner and Carr, along with Sharpton — who has worked closely with the family since Garner’s death — have reportedly met with Attorney General Eric Holder, and the U.S. Justice Department has confirmed that it will conduct a civil rights investigation into the case.

“I’m determined to get justice for my husband,” Garner said Wednesday. “My husband’s death will not be in vain. I will fight till the end.”

Matt Sledge contributed reporting.

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Nigella Lawson Talks About 'The Taste', 'Modern Family' and Beer Pong

For more food drink and travel videos visit www.potluckvideo.com

Nigella Lawson is a renowned cookbook author and television host, but who knew she was great at beer pong?

We sat down with Lawson to celebrate the launch of the third season of The Taste — airing Thursday December 4 at 9pm on ABC — and we asked her 5 Questions on everything ranging from whether the Taste judges Anthony Bourdain, Marcus Samuelsson and Ludo Lefebvre are competitive behind closed doors to how she recently became a ‘guest star’ on Modern Family.

To watch Nigella Lawson’s full interview — and learn about what will be in her next cookbook and really get the details on that beer pong talent — watch the full video above!

For more great food, drink and travel videos make sure to check out Potluck Video’s website, head over to our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter

Convenient Ways to Get Help With Your Social Security Questions

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Dear Savvy Senior,
Can you recommend some easier ways that I can get help with my Social Security questions? When I call their toll-free help line I get put on hold forever, and the wait time at my local Social Security office is over two hours.

–Approaching 62

Dear Approaching,
It’s unfortunate, but the past few years the Social Security Administration has made some major budget and staff cuts that have greatly increased their phone service and field office wait times for their customers. With that said, here’s an alternative option and some tips that can help make your access to Social Security a little faster and easier.

Online Services
With the evolution of the Social Security website, the quickest and most convenient way to work with Social Security these days is to do it yourself online. Depending on what you need, most tasks can be done at SocialSecurity.gov like getting your Social Security statement, estimating your future benefits, applying for retirement or disability benefits, signing up for direct deposit, replacing a Medicare card and much more. See a complete list of what you can do online at ssa.gov/onlineservices.

You can also get information and answers to most of your Social Security questions at faq.ssa.gov if you’re patient enough to read through the information yourself.

But, if you need more help than their website offers, you can always call Social Security’s toll-free service line at 800-772-1213 Monday through Friday between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. and ask your question over the phone, or make a scheduled appointment with your local field office. To reduce your wait time, avoid calling during their rush hour times, which are the first week of the month, and daily from about 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.

Need Advice?
If you’re seeking advice on when you should start taking your Social Security benefits, you need to know that while Social Security employees do provide information on how the system works under different circumstances, they aren’t allowed to give case-specific advice on when you should start drawing your benefits.

If you want help with this, you’ll need to turn to some of the free or fee-based Social Security tools that are available online through private financial service companies or AARP.

Depending on the service, these tools take into account the different rules and claiming strategies that can affect your benefits, and some of them can crunch hundreds of calculations to compare your benefits under various scenarios and different ages to help you figure out the best time to start claiming.

Some of the best free tools are AARP’s Social Security Calculator; SSAnalyze which is offered by Bedrock Capital Management; and Analyze Now, which offers a “Free Strategic Social Security Planner” but requires Microsoft Excel to use it.

Or, if you don’t mind spending a little money, there are higher-level services you can use like Maximize My Social Security, which charges $40 for their report, and takes into account the thousands of different factors and combinations to help you maximize your benefits.

And Social Security Solutions, which offers several levels of service (ranging between $20 and $250) including their $125 “Advised” plan that runs multiple calculations and comparisons, recommends a best course of action in a detailed report and gives you a one-on-one session with a Social Security specialist over the phone to discuss the report and ask questions.

Send your senior questions to: Savvy Senior, P.O. Box 5443, Norman, OK 73070, or visit SavvySenior.org. Jim Miller is a contributor to the NBC Today show and author of “The Savvy Senior” book.