Blue Collar Workforce

What the blue collar workforce is

The blue collar workforce (ذوو الياقات الزرقاء), whose members are also called blue collar workers, is a management description for the category of jobs whose work is performed at the operating site itself and whose completion depends on being present there at a set time. The category covers production lines, warehouses, construction sites, kitchens, maintenance and transport fleets. In usage, its counterpart is the description of office jobs, known as white collar jobs.

Two elements carry the definition. The first is the place: the work is done at the site where the operation runs, not wherever the employee happens to be. The second is the time: the work has to be done at the hour the operation sets, not at an hour the employee chooses.

What the term blue collar workforce describes

The term describes where the work is done and what kind of work it is, not the skill of the person who does it or the value of what they do. A job in this category can require long training or a professional licence, and an office job may require neither. Placing a role in the blue collar workforce says where and how its work is done. It does not say what level of qualification the role needs.

The term is also a management label, used in planning and in reporting. In the sources we reviewed, namely the Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل) and its Implementing Regulation (اللائحة التنفيذية), we found no category of worker under the name blue collar. Questions of pay, working hours or safety are therefore settled by the source that governs each of them, not by the category in which a role was placed in a management table.

Pay follows the employment contract and the wage provisions of the Labor Law. Working hours are governed by the hours provisions of the Labor Law, set out in our guide to working hours and the weekly rest in the Saudi Labor Law. Safety duties are likewise governed by provisions of the Labor Law, which are described under health and safety officer. A label in a planning table does not change any of these.

What differs in managing a blue collar workforce

The practical difference does not lie in the people. It lies in five constraints that come with work tied to a set place and a set time:

• Coverage comes before attendance. The work is tied to a site and an hour, so the absence of one person does not mean a task is delayed. It means a gap in the cover of a period of time. The schedule can therefore be run as shift work, whose original purpose is to cover an extended span of time, not to lengthen the day of a single employee.
• The unit of measurement. It is the hour and the shift, not the month. So the absenteeism rate is examined shift by shift rather than as one combined figure, and the size of a team is counted in full time equivalents where the mix of working schedules differs between teams. In that unit, someone who works half the full schedule counts as a half, which is the same unit that sits in the denominator of revenue per FTE.
• The structure of pay. Part of it is linked to time, to the shift and to the site, so the amount paid can change from one month to the next without any change in the role. What prevents a dispute here is that the components of pay, and the reason for each component, are known to the employee before the month, not after it.
• Safety at the site. Work close to equipment, vehicles or heat makes safety part of daily management and of the way each shift is arranged. It is not a file that is reviewed once a year.
• The interface with systems. Roles in this category may have no office computer and no work email, and some of them work in several languages. Any screen these employees are asked to use has to be readable on a phone, in a minute and with one hand. Otherwise it will not be used.

On the length of each worker’s day, the Labor Law sets limits that apply to shift work as well. Article 98 of the Labor Law sets a ceiling of 8 actual working hours a day where the employer adopts the daily standard, or 48 hours a week where the employer adopts the weekly standard. Article 100 of the Labor Law allows the employer, with the approval of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development, in establishments where the nature of the work requires work by rotation, to exceed 8 hours a day or 48 hours a week, provided the average working hours, calculated over a period of three weeks or less, do not exceed 8 hours a day or 48 hours a week. So a shift pattern exists to cover time, and each worker’s hours are still measured against the ceilings of the Labor Law. Royal Decree M/44 of 1446H did not amend Article 98 or Article 100 of the Labor Law.

Where managing a blue collar workforce goes wrong

A mistake that can recur is carrying an office procedure over to the operating site unchanged. A request submitted by email, an announcement posted on an internal portal, or a schedule sent as a file that has to be opened on a computer: each of these reaches the office, and none of them reaches the night shift. The outcome is then misread as employees declining to take part, when the cause is that the channel never reached them in the first place.

Part of this is addressed by employee self service, an arrangement under which employees carry out for themselves what used to pass through human resources, such as a leave request, an update to their personal details, and viewing their documents and their balances. Employee self service does not, however, replace a clear policy behind it.

The blue collar workforce and capacity planning

The effect of capacity planning shows with particular clarity in the blue collar workforce, because the work is tied to a time and a place and cannot be deferred to the following week. An hour of shortfall in today’s shift is work that was not done today. It is not work that has built up and can be cleared later. That is why the shortfall is calculated at the level of the shift and the site, not at the level of the department over a month.

This is an explanation of the concept and of the statutory provisions cited, not legal advice.