Employment Standards in Kuwaiti Legislation and Judiciary (Comparative Critical Analysis Study)

Employment is considered as one of the most significant annual plan programs for the management of human resources. It represents a very extensive and complicated matter which includes the applied strategies, approaches, criteria, and procedures to select and solicit qualified candidates to occupy public jobs. Therefore, the central authorities of the public job endeavor to expand and diversify the sources of employment. Thus, they allocate a specific percentage for external employment in order to support public facilities with new technical capacities, particularly through the inclusion of the holders of university certificates and academic qualifications. Furthermore, a specific percentage is allocated for internal employment, which targets the occupation of vacant positions in the employing department from among its employees who are in actual service status. This procedure includes the permanent employees benefitting from promotion in the grade or job upgrade. However, despite the significant attractiveness enjoyed by the employment rules and principles in light of the Kuwaiti employment system, the inductive and comparative analysis has proved the existence of several gaps and shortcomings in the employment system, which is basically attributed to the lack of examining the employment criteria in light of the legal provisions. This matter has provided the employing departments extensive discretionary authorities in this respect. As a result, the recruitment processes deviated from the principle of legality to fall into the trap of bureaucracy, which leads us to question the effectiveness of legislative and judicial reforms that have been presented in this regard. This study has allowed to reach several results, the most important of which is the crucial role that the Court of Cassation played through its oversight of the health and safety of employment decisions, and in return we came up with a set of recommendations, the most important of which are: obliging the administration to respect the legal deadlines for employment, and setting internal and external recruitment standards to restrict the administration's powers.