The official UAE government portal has recently updated (9 February 2023) the types of leaves and entitlements applicable to private sector employees.
One among them and the most recent is the 10 days paid leave given to be private sector employees to study and appear for examinations. This latest updation in the Labour Law actually promotes the educational status of the workers.
What are the conditions included?
As per the UAE labour law, private-sector employees and employers enjoy all the benefits and laws that are applicable to the public-sector employees. As per Article 32 (2), an employee is granted a total of 10 working days off per year for the study purpose.
To avail this, the employee must complete at least 2 years of service under the employer and they must be attending an educational institution in UAE.
In detail, if the worker is studying at any educational institution in UAE, they will get a total of 10 working days off every year so that they can study, prepare and write the examinations. This helps the employees to achieve greater professional growth. This leave is provided only for those students who are working.
Types of leaves
From February 2022 onwards, the UAE workers are getting different types of leaves based on various articles of the Federal Decree-Law No.33. This includes annual, maternity, paternal, sabbatical and bereavement.
In Article 28 all the official holidays are included. Meanwhile Article 29 covers the laws concerning the annual leaves. As per the Article 21, employees of private sector get at least 1 day of paid leave per week.
Following these, there are other set of articles specifying the maternity and sick leaves available to the workers. Other leaves entitled to the employees include bereavement leave, paternal leave, study leave as well as a paid sabbatical, which are accessible to the Emirati employees.
Employees receive a total of three to five days of leave if their immediate family member dies and it falls under the bereavement leave. Similarly a paternal leave for 5 workings days are given during the period of 6 month after the birth of the child. Workers who complete their probationary period gets 90 days sick leave per year and the female workers gets 60 days of maternity leave.
This new set of leaves provided by the UAE Labour Law helps to maintain a work-life balance. As a result the benefits mostly enjoyed by the government employees are now equally accessible to the private sector workers. This helps in an increase in the number of employment in the private sector.
