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[Ed-Ucator]

GTC (General Trading Company) in Kuwait City contracts educators (and those in several other fields) to work on various educational projects that tend to be wonderful... but GTC itself is not.

What follows is only some of what happened to nearly twenty of us educators,... and I do not want to even think about what happens to those who are considered by GTC to be in less noble professions.

Kuwait law says that employees must be paid monthly and no later than seven days after the wage's due-date, but GTC pays whenever it wants to IF it wants to, simply put. If you disregard the advice of this post and sign up to work for them anyway, be sure to form good friendships with your co-workers because you will all be borrowing from each other for gas, food, and rent. You will suffer late or no salary; receiving no more than approximately one third of your annual leave (also paid late although the labor law says that annual leave must be paid before the first day of taking such leave); being cheated out of terminal indemnities entirely; having your passport held -- which is illegal in Kuwait -- and being forced to sign a document promising that IF you borrow your own country's passport for travel, you will return it to GTC by a certain date (otherwise GTC should understand that you agree to be considered terminated from your job).

You will pay for your own residency (and its periodic renewal), your own basic (government) health care, all needed official stamps, and things such as the fee for your own gate pass to get you into the place where GTC has hired you to work.

You may go to jail as a result of GTC's enormous delay in transferring your residency. This happened to three of us.

When you leave Kuwait to renew your residency, you are completely out-of-pocket for ALL related costs: round-trip airline ticket, hotel stay, food and water to keep you alive. Several of us had no residency at all and simply worked illegally.

GTC does not pay the apartment rent portion of your salary during the summer because it is... summer,... so you foot your own apartment bill for two months even though Kuwaiti law defines monthly remuneration as basic salary plus all allowances.

It is impossible to get anyone on the phone or to meet with you when they promised they would whenever you have a genuine problem that only GTC can help you solve for being your sponsor,... but if you go out for a smoke one time too many at your job site, some GTC hired spy (this is literal, not a joke or an exaggeration) reports this, and you hear from GTC right away.

GTC "warns" and investigates you all the time, but the assistance that they are legally obligated to extend to you seems never to arrive. You are literally on your own and at the mercy of the kindness of strangers.

You are threatened (again, literally) with so many things that I can not list them all here. For example, when the contract of the project that we were all on ended, GTC charged each of us 1,500 KD (almost 5,500 US dollars) if we wanted to transfer to the new company that was taking our project on. If we were unable to pay or refused to, then we were forced under duress (their preference is to hold you in a 2 to 8 hour... "meeting" until you relent) to sign that we agreed to work for one of their own educational entities called Arab Development Center.

Please be advised of what we learned: Arab Development Center has been closed since before September of 2010 -- it lost its education license back then.

Please beware of this company and mostly of the very cruel, cold people who own and operate it. The things in this post are in no way unique to us. GTC has been doing these things to all its employees for very, very many years now (every bit of this is verifiable if you wish to confirm it).

Educators are a fine bunch and do not deserve this kind of disrespect from anyone, anywhere.

If you hear of anyone applying to GTC (General Trading Company) in Kuwait City for any kind of project, please warn them as strongly as you can.

No one who is well-meaning and hardworking deserves such harm. No one.

[Ed-Ucator]

The indiansinkuwait.com web site has the new, official Kuwait private sector labor law:


http://www.indiansinkuwait.com/press/KuwaitLaborLaw.pdf


Best 40-page read, ever.

Know your rights, and demand them as you can.