Employment and outsourcing support in the UAE
People work for you without being your employees. We will say which arrangement that actually is under the law, what licence it needs, and who answers for the person when something goes wrong.
In the labour law
В трудовом законе
Four work patterns
Четыре модели работы
Recruitment costs
Расходы на подбор
Never on the worker
Никогда не на работнике
When you need outsourcing support
Your team includes another company’s staff
They sit at your desks, take your instructions and appear in your planning. On paper they belong to someone else, and the paper is what an inspector reads.
A vendor supplies people by name
The agreement promises a service, and the invoice lists individuals you chose yourself. Those are two different arrangements with two different duties.
Group staff work at your site
A colleague is lent from another company in the group for a few months. Who employs them, who permits the work and who answers for it are three questions.
Freelancers look like your employees
Fixed hours, a company address and daily direction describe employment whatever the contract is called. The facts decide, and the facts are visible.
You want to supply staff yourself
Making your people available to a third party is its own regulated activity. A trade licence for something adjacent does not carry it.
A client asks who employs them
Procurement, tenders and audits ask for the employment chain in writing. The answer has to hold together before it is given, and it is checkable.
What outsourcing support covers
Every arrangement in which someone works for you without being your employee rests on one question: who is the employer. The contract title does not settle it. What settles it is who recruits, who pays, who directs the day and where the work is done.
The labour law names four patterns of work — full time, part time, temporary and flexible — and lets the implementing regulation add others. That settles how a person works. It does not settle whose contract they work under, and on a site with several suppliers those two answers come apart.
What you get
- A written answer to who employs each person working for you.
- The arrangement named against the law, with the licence it needs.
- A contract chain in which pay, direction, safety and records each have an owner.
- Worker-facing terms that match what the commercial agreement says.
- A file that survives a procurement questionnaire or an inspection.
What stays on your side
- Choosing who you want and what they are to do.
- Day-to-day direction of the work, inside the scope agreed.
- The site, the equipment and the conditions people work in.
- Telling us when the task, the hours or the location change.
Where you hand part of your own work to another employer, that employer alone carries the rights of its own workers on that work — unless the two of you agree otherwise. That exception is the sentence worth reading twice, because it is where liability quietly moves back.
How the arrangement is classified
Supply of workers
An agency employs the person and makes them available to you; you assign and supervise the work while the employment relationship stays with the agency.
Mediation
An intermediary brings you and the candidate together and then steps out of it. You contract with the person yourself and are the employer from day one.
Managed service
A supplier owes you a result and runs its own people to produce it. Picking the individuals yourself is what turns this back into supply.
Secondment
Another company in the group lends you someone for a period. Employer, supervision, permit, cost and liability all need writing down before the move.
Sources: Federal Decree-Law 33 of 2021, articles 6, 7, 11 and 12; recruiting on the mainland, recruiting in free zones and running a business in a free zone (UAE Government portal).
Stages of work
Describing the real relationship.
We will write down, person by person, who found them, who pays them, who tells them what to do each day and whose site they stand on. This is the part everyone assumes is obvious, and it is where the answers disagree.
Naming the arrangement.
Against that description we will say which of the four it is — supply, mediation, a managed service or a secondment — and what each one carries with it. The name comes from the facts, and the licence follows the name.
Checking permits and the licence.
We will confirm that the activity on the licence covers what is actually happening, that each worker holds the permit their route requires, and that a free zone address is not being read as permission it does not give.
The contract chain.
Agreement between the parties, terms facing the worker, and the allocation of direction, hours, safety, records, replacement and exit. We will draft them as one set so that they cannot contradict one another later.
Starting people with a record.
Identity, permit, qualifications, signed terms, site induction and system access, each evidenced when it happens. Reconstructing this afterwards is possible, and it is done from memory.
The running reconciliation.
Roster, location, hours, pay, complaints and incidents get compared against what was agreed. A change of task, site or supervisor is approved before it happens, because it can move the arrangement into another category.
Your own employment file — permits, contracts and the wage channel — sits in WPS registration and HR compliance.
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