Not enough Accommodation Allowance or Provident Fund
If I had to do it all again I would have chosen Hong Kong. Today I would still favour Hong Kong. Dubai is an appealing move right now if you skip over two of the most vital components to a career, where you live (and how that benefits your retirement nest egg) and the final worth of the provident fund.
The issue for expats here is after 15 years your retirement funds accumulated through the provident fund program will provide no more than 2 years of your final salary including your own 5% contribution. Fortunately for the UAE Nationals they have a reasonable retirement plan with a significant lpercentage of final year salary paid throughout remaining life and indexed when you retire, even after 15 years of service.
Should you choose not to take the company accommodation offering, which can be anything up to an hour in traffic from the beach, then you will find the housing allowance is minimal when compared to actual market rate. This does not then benefit your end of career nest egg as it does in Hong Kong.
A pilot achieves less than 1/2 the allowance of what many comparable managers are given outside the airline. So unlike Hong Kong where an allowance can be used to assist in paying off a place of substance in Dubai you will be faced with very expensive electricity and water bills and have minimal left over to support a hefty mortgage. A side note is that fortunately the UAE Nationals pay a more reasonable rate on utilities.
Some expats have left Dubai to go to Hong Kong to take advantage of the better accommodation allowance and sensibly invest there, on a whole the retirement fund is better as well.
Emirates may have to address these issues to enable the expansion and achieve the standard of recruit required. Interestingly in the last few years they have misread the training demand and have had to bring in very expensive outside training resources whilst allowing their own training Captains to leave the training department in numbers. Someone has not had the big overall picture in mind when looking at what this has cost the company.
They can’t allow the same to happen with the recruitment for line pilots and maintain plans for expansion there is no salary movement or conditions of employment up for review until mid next year. As a consequence this may be the most difficult period yet in Emirates expansion; they are trying very hard to bring in the recruits without realistically addressing the very different economy in Dubai today compared to even 2 years ago. The one hope for Emirates is the road shows are successful otherwise other enticements may have to be brought in earlier.
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Last edited by Sander; 15th Oct 2007 at 13:48.
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