Riyadh: About 2.5 million Saudis and expatriates have joined Saudi labor market in the past 15 months, local media reported.
The reports monitored by the Arabic daily Okaz based on government data that women made up majority of the total number of 428,000 Saudis who were employed in the local labor market during the period from the beginning of the last quarter of 2021 until the end of the year 2022.
A total of 255000 Saudi women joined the labor market while the number of Saudi men who were employed during the period reached about 173,000.
During the 15-month period, the number of expatriates who joined the labor market exceeded 1.62 million. Among them 1.43 million men and 197,000 women.
It was revealed in the monitoring that the Saudi unemployment rate recorded its lowest historical levels in the fourth quarter of 2022, due to the continuous employment of citizens and residents in the last 15 months.
The monitoring was based on the data from the General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI), the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development (MoHRSD) and the National Information Center (NIC).
It is noteworthy that the total number of foreign domestic workers in the Kingdom reached 3.6 million by the end of 2022, including 2.63 million men, most of whom are house drivers, servants and house cleaners, while the number of domestic workers reached 972,000.
During the past few years, Saudi Arabia announced the localization of workers in several economic sectors, as part of the Kingdom’s efforts to reduce the unemployment rate to 7 per cent by 2030, as part of its vision to diversify sources of income and reduce dependence on oil.
