Valerie Priscilla Goby, Zayed UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Journal of Business Ethics

Publication Date

10-1-2015

Abstract

© 2014, The Author(s). This paper addresses the tension between the government policy to increase the number of citizens working in the private sector in the United Arab Emirates and the organizational preference for employing expatriate workers. Currently a dominant construal of the limited success of the policy is that the local workforce, traditionally employed largely in government positions, is unwilling to commit to the perceived greater rigor of the private sector. The author reconceptualizes the issue as one deriving from a principle of corporate financialization in which companies claim the right to optimize their labor costs as much as possible. This paper briefly discusses corporate financialization, overviews the workforce localization program in the United Arab Emirates, termed Emiratization, highlights the reasons cited for its limited success, and argues that this is due to corporate strategy of selecting their workforce according to financial and rights-related criteria. The issue is an ethical one in that a local population, the natural labor force, is marginalized in a national context of immigration laws permitting the large scale importation of cheaper and more compliant foreign labor.

ISSN

0167-4544

Publisher

Kluwer Academic Publishers

Volume

131

Issue

2

First Page

415

Last Page

421

Disciplines

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keywords

Corporate financialization, Stereotypes, United Arab Emirates, Workforce localization

Scopus ID

84945489361

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Hybrid: This publication is openly available in a subscription-based journal/series

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