How to pay workers when oil runs out? A question troubling Gulf rulers

Government is the employer of first resort -- even when it has nothing much for its employees to do

Show up, swipe in. The routine is familiar to office workers everywhere. In Kuwait, it proved too much to ask.

The government was trying to trim a wage bill that eats up more than half its budget -- an outlandish share even by Gulf standards. Last year, it required public employees to swipe their fingers on a biometric reader every morning. The following quarter, about 5,000 quit. Many of them rarely if ever turned up, and were worried they’d get caught under the new rule, according to Khalifa Hamada, the undersecretary at Kuwait’s Finance Ministry.

All Persian Gulf monarchies have