The taxi driver’s life — short, brutish and cruel

DAMMAM, 4 December — Are sales and other revenue-generating staff in commercial firms commission agents, business partners or employees? The contract between them and companies defines them as employees, hired on a particular salary to perform a particular job. But in reality they get neither salaries nor benefits.

So a new trend has begun in the Kingdom, with many companies now hiring their staff strictly on a commission basis. However, to conform to the labor law, these companies do get such employees to sign a salary statement and they all in theory benefit from a salary scale. In practice, that signature isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

Taxi firms initiated this trend almost five years ago. Under the arrangement, each driver was required to pay SR135 a day (in some cases SR150 per day) to the company. His earnings above SR135 were his to keep, and if a driver failed to deliver the SR135 on any particular day the balance would accrue. All expenses related to the maintenance of the taxi itself were met by the driver — including gasoline, repairs and traffic violation fines.

In addition, every driver pays for his own iqama, exit and re-entry visa, medical fee and air tickets for vacation. Many companies do not even provide medical insurance.

When this exploitation was reported in the Arabic and English press, the Labor Ministry — in conjunction with the Ministry of Communications — immediately made it mandatory for all the taxi companies to pay a salary to their drivers. A few companies then started paying a token SR500 per month, but still made the drivers sign higher salary vouchers. In the end, many did not pay any salary at all: Again, they were playing the game to meet the legal requirements.

A number of big companies, including HANCO and Al-Safi, now have a reputation for paying good salaries and extending all benefits to their drivers.

There have also been reports of drivers being physically harassed for failing to hand over the required daily premium — and then daring to report their situation to the Labor Ministry.

In one taxi company, a Bangladeshi driver was beaten up and then sent to jail on some cock-and-bull charge. He was released when the police discovered that the charges were false.

A Pakistani driver in Jeddah broke down while narrating his tale. He told this reporter that the manager of his company beat him up because he failed to hand over the required SR135 on two occasions.

Such drivers work tirelessly — in most cases, between 12 to 15 hours every day — to earn the SR135 daily fee, and then a little more for themselves and their families. “We do not get proper sleep; nor do we eat properly,” said Shaeedul Islam, a Bangladeshi driver, who paid nearly SR5,000 to a recruiting agent back in Dhaka to get him the job. Today he regrets having made that decision.

In order to pick up more and more passengers, these drivers often speed, park illegally, stop abruptly and fight among themselves. “We know that people hate our driving, but on many occasions we are forced to do so. If we don’t drive like this we will not make any money — it’s as simple as that,” said Murtaza Hossain, another Bangladeshi driver.

Taxi companies, however, deny these charges. They say that they do pay salaries. To prove their point, they produce signed salary statements. One company pointed this reporter toward three Sri Lankan drivers whom it said would act as witnesses. One driver said that they were indeed getting a salary and if they earned more than SR135 they got commission as well. But, as this reporter came out of the office, more than a dozen drivers — many of them Sri Lankan with a few Indians and Pakistanis — said that it was all stage-managed and the truth was that they were not paid any salary at all.

One Indian driver, however, admitted that this arrangement suited him, as he was earning nearly SR4,000 a month after paying the required money.

Some drivers say that many of their colleagues break the law to earn a fast buck and meet their targets.

The Ministry of Communications nearly two years ago decided that all the foreign drivers working in taxi companies would be phased out and replaced by Saudi drivers. But nothing along those lines has thus far taken place, and many Saudi drivers from the Qatif and Hofuf areas told me that when they had approached taxi companies looking for a job their applications had been rejected.

It is a fact that Saudi drivers will not agree to work without salary and they will not put up with harassment from the executives. Perhaps this is the reason taxi companies are reluctant to hire Saudi drivers. Is it not ironic that one taxi company has been putting an advertisement in a newspaper every day for the past year looking for drivers, but it will not specify a salary. Instead, it talks about “attractive incentives and easy conditions”.

One year on, those vacancies remain.