Mick Hartley

Or, getting your knickers in a twist.

In Saudi Arabia, you may recall, women are not allowed to work as cashiers in supermarkets and the like, because they will then be interacting with unrelated men. As this applies even to lingerie shops, Saudi women find themselves in the unfortunate position of having to discuss the fine points of their most intimate apparel with  unrelated men. Worse, these men are more often than not foreign. 

Back in 2005 the Ministry of Labour, made aware of the problem, ordered lingerie shops to employ women only. Nothing much happened. Leading clerics, sniffing heresy, issued a fatwa which confirmed that cashier jobs for women were absolutely not permissible.

Then earlier this year King Abdullah, prompted by a Facebook campaign, stepped in with a royal decree reaffirming the Ministry of Labour's order. Once again the religious authorities countered, this time in the formidable shape of the Muttawa, the Religious Police, with a series of raids on lingerie shops to check that no women were employed there….and possibly to see if they could get a discount on a negligee or two.

So where are we now? Well, things move slowly in the Kingdom:

Shops selling women’s fashion and lingerie that continue to employ male staff will be prevented from obtaining services offered by the Ministry of Labor if they do not start hiring women immediately.

In 2005 the Ministry of Labor ordered lingerie shops to start replacing foreign male sales clerks with women. It has been more than five years now and only the Nayomi lingerie chain and Centrepoint have successfully hired women clerks in their shops all over the Kingdom.

“If by January these shops are still employing salesmen, they will be barred from all the ministry's services including, among others, issuance of work visas to recruit manpower from abroad,” said ministry spokesman Hattab bin Saleh Al-Anzi….

Fatima Qaroob, founder of the “Enough Embarrassment” campaign that calls for saleswomen to be employed in lingerie shops, said the 2005 order was issued by the Labor Ministry, while the one issued in 2011 had royal approval.

“Four years after the ministerial decree, I met with lingerie shop owners and asked them the reason why they were not complying and they claimed the ministry did not send an official request demanding them to employ women,” she said. “I believe businessmen are just lazy and they claim that it is difficult to train women.”

This one's scheduled to run for a while yet.