Thursday, December 4, 2008

Survey, Numbers and Future

Intmarket-3s

This article from Brudirect highlight some interesting numbers:
  • 75 per cent of oil and gas sector employees are locals.
  • 4,379 staff out of which 3,203 are Brunei Citizens or PR.
A much more interesting article is about the SPE Salary survey:
  • In both North/Central Asia and Southeast Asia, the average base pay reported by non citizens is about four times greater than that of citizens.
  • Annual base pay for citizen is US$44k while non citizen is US$180k.
The standard explanation for the difference is because this non citizen has to pay for his commitment in his home country. This may be valid many years ago but now, I doubt it.

The SPE survey also mentioned "Yet in the US, Australia/New Zealand, Canada, and North Sea/North Atlantic, the differences between noncitizen and citizen pay are far smaller. and in the US and North Sea regions, the base pay for noncitizens is lower".

The gap between citizen/non citizen has been there for many years, probably since oil first discovered but what can we do to reduce the gap? The industry are paying the non citizen almost similar amount in all the regions.

It will be a shame if our future generation still has to face this situation and had to relocate to earn fair wages.

Time will tell, God willing changes will come.

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