Bahrain Mirror (Exclusive): Official employees stressed that the Civil Service Bureau stopped granting improving of livelihood allowance to a number of official employees. The bureau also stopped paying administrative bonuses given to head of departments in a number of institutions.

According to information, employees of Bahrain Training Institution, which comprises 200 employees, are the most harmed from this decision whose reasons haven't been known yet. Administrative bonuses specialized for head of departments in the institution have also been stopped.

The institute's employees were surprised by the lack of salaries transferred to them through the banks, and it was later shown that the "improving of livelooh" allowance (60 Dinars) was stopped without any prior notice by the Ministry of Education.

It is to note that improving of livelihood allowance was given to the institute's employees on the onset of 2013, after two years of delay since its approval in August 2011.

A number of members of the Bahrain Training Institute have submitted a letter to the Crown Prince, First Deputy Prime Minister Salman bin Hamad Al khalifa, in which they said that the institute has been destroyed, at several levels, including the financial level, as the financial resources have been depleted. They added that it has become something usual to deduct the salaries or equivalent entitlements the employees used to receive without notice and without the taking into consideration their circumstances and their financial obligations, noting that these are acts of reprisals.

The letter added "the question which the ministry will not answer is why the employees' benefits were stopped and why weren't they notified beforehand?"

Before becoming under the hand of the Ministry of Education in 2011, the institute was a semi-governmental institution under the authority of the Supreme Council for Vocational training, and the institute's salaries and working hours were under the supreme council's regulations.

Bahrain's economy suffers from serious and numerous financial problems. Bahrain's budget has been in chronic deficit for seven consecutive years as a result of the constant rise in military expenditures and other non-productive expenses, in addition to the emergence of a new and unknown dilemma in the GCC countries which is the deficit of the commodity trade balance. Thus, the government is forced to withdraw from the cash reserve and to resort to internal and external borrowing.

Arabic Version