The school officials in Sabah Salim said they were frustrated by the new rule and had wanted to hire another staffer, but they were now being forced to look elsewhere.
MEETING MORE BLACKLISTED FOLK IN KUWAIT
Since I had begun running up against with the Kuwaiti kinships propaganda rumor mill which seems to drive these small city states in the Gulf, I have discovered that there have been many such blacklisting agreements between schools and universities in Kuwait, i.e. not to hire staff from each other.
For example, reports from the Lebanon based American Open University in Kuwait indicate that currently all Americans are being blacklisted from hire at that institution. (There are a few Americans still working there, but they were apparently grandfathered in prior to these new rules.) Moreover, that same university also refuses to hire any more teachers from GUST.
I recently interviewed at a university, which refuses to hire people who have instructed at the secondary or tertiary in Kuwait. (The reason for this was explained by whom the owner of that university was, i.e. the owner has connections with other schools.)
Worse still is the fact that rumor and innuendo have a lot to do with how people’s employment is daily being mugged from them here—in a land which barely follows half of the WTO’s rules and other international laws related to the work place.
For example, one former employee at one Gulf university shared how rumors had started to fly from the first day she arrived on campus.
She was told several bad and absolutely false things about herself that very first day—all which could not be true as the rumors claimed she had lived in Kuwait before, but she had never set foot in the country before she began to teach here.
This particular American professor revealed how sleazy these below-the-belt rumors were.
In the charged social and political climate of today, the rumor mongers control so much. In this woman’s case these rumors were bounced around campus and collected by others who wanted to play political-power games with her or with her department colleagues over the coming year. She was ultra-stressed out.
Luckily, that same female professor successfully made the jump to another university that would have her. The best news is that unlike at many other schools in the regions, this new university didn’t buy into the fictional Kuwaiti wasta-rumor mill--dominating the job markets of unsuspecting incoming foreigners.
Needless to say, the very fact that that particular American professor was unmarried—likely fueled the rumors upon her arrival.
I have certainly observed the unfair rumors that often fly around foreign women in Kuwait. One female ex-pat principle of a secondary school, has noted in no uncertain terms to her colleagues, “Stop spreading gossip! You are ruining peoples lives and careers.”
In short, due to the combination of crony capitalism and the power of wasta connections, peoples lives are getting hurt or imperiled too often in the Gulf.
IS THEIR HOPE FOR IMPROVEMENT?
Before any reader charges that I am being unfair to the Kuwaiti culture, I need to state clearly that blacklisting and blackballing occurs against employees in and among Western Nations, too.
