Construction firms in Qatar are facing a severe shortage of skilled workers, mainly due to lower salaries offered to construction labourers.
“Owing to low salaries, we are unable to recruit workers from the traditional labour-supplying nations in Asia,” a construction firm executive was quoted as saying by the Gulf Times.
Salaries for the middle and senior levels have increased marginally in recent years, while those for the construction workforce remained unchanged, the executive said.
This has led to only very few workers at the lower levels willing to renew their contract, which caused a number of projects to run behind schedule, he said.
A boom in construction activities in the traditional Asian labour-supplying nations, where unskilled construction workers are drawing between $10-12 a day compared with less than about $220 a month in Qatar, is also drawing many workers back to their home countries.