Saudi Gazette report

RIYADH — With about 440,000 Saudi workforce of both genders in the retail and wholesale business, the sector has seen an increase of 25 percent more jobs at the end of the first quarter of 2019. Last year, the number was about 330,000, business daily Al-Eqtisadiah reported on Saturday quoting official figures.

Women employees in the wholesale and retail sections of the private sector were 166,135 with an increase of 50,000 over last year while the men remained at 273,709.

The total number of employees in this sector were 2,049,245 consisting of 1,609,401 expatriates including 28,520 women.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Labor and Social Development said it had conducted more than 149,000 inspection tours on the private sector establishments all over the Kingdom during the first quarter of the year and detected more than 23,000 violations.

The ministry said its 700 employees who made the tours discovered that the most important violations were expatriates taking jobs which were solely marked for Saudis.

It said it had received more than 4,300 objections to the violations it had discovered and has accepted 420 of them.