Bahrain Mirror: The Secretary General of the General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions (GFBTU), Hassan Al-Halwachi, was surprized about the statement issued by an MP regarding the inclination of the Finance Committee in the House of Representatives to introduce a legislation allowing the use of the unemployment insurance fund savings to fund the general budget deficit.

Al-Halwachi said that the statement issued by the MP is surprizing, as the community and workers were expecting an improvement in the conditions and offering of unemployment insurance, by either raising the ceiling of the grants or increasing the duration in a way that helps the unemployed afford minimum living costs, and not spending those savings on funding the general budget.

He added that the Public Authority for Social Insurance, in its capacity as the competent party in managing the insurance fund for unemployment, has a great responsibility in confronting such calls and responding to them. He stressed that the absence of workers' representation in the decision-making in the Social Security Authority, unfortunately makes the concerned persons who are the workers, distant from the deciding the fate of the  funds of hundreds of thousands of insured workers. This puts their interests at risk as a result of unstudied decisions that would harm the social protection system that represented over the years the workers' only umbrella that he would resort to he ends up unemployed or retired.

Hassan Al-Halwachi warned that the MP's statement would "launch a dangerous trend that allows the use of the insurance sources to fund the general budget. What today appears to be limited to the insurance fund against unemployment may reach the rest of the insurances sources, which we cannot accept as a General Union. Using this money is not accepted in any case because this money was salaries from the workers ' salaries and the accumulation of these sums doesn't mean there's is an overload as much as it means they need to be re-managed in a way that conforms to maintaining the dignity of unemployed Bahraini with developed mechanisms and in a way that goes along to keeping pace with the rate of inflation experienced by everyone."

Arabic Version