AMMAN — In
Amman,
clerks stationed outside courthouses and official buildings were once a common
sight. They made their living helping customers fill out forms and finalize
documents.
اضافة اعلان
Historically, their
job was to write petitions filed by citizens with government offices, and
evolved to include doing all paper work for customers that have official
business with a government department.
But the increasing
digitalization of the
Jordanian government has led to the decline of this once
reliable profession.
“I studied law for two
years in Damascus, but I did not complete my studies,” document clerk, Naem
Majaly, said in an interview with Jordan News. “I practiced the
profession of being a document clerk because I loved it, and I have been
working in this profession for over 17 years.”
For Majaly, “The
problem is that our profession is not subject to development,” he said. “Ideas
have evolved, laws have evolved, but our work’s license is based on a law from
the year 1956.”
“This profession has
no future because we are moving towards an electronic government,” Majaly said.
“And many things are practiced electronically, and sometimes, it’s needless to
come to court.”
“There are many
difficulties,” Naem Majaly added. “We cannot bring our computer, our printer to
write so that we can develop our profession. We are still using the old
printer; although there are small rooms dedicated to document clerks in the
design of the Palace of Justice, they do not allow us to use them. We sit under
the sun, and this a challenging situation. They use these rooms as a warehouse
which is not the main purpose that they were built for.”
One clerk has been
working for over half a century. “I began practicing the profession of being a
document clerk from the age of fifteen,” Abu Mohammad Alshamaileh said in an
interview with Jordan News.
“I practiced this
profession because my father had been working in the Amman Palace of Justice
since 1955 and retired in 1983, and through that, I became fascinated with
writing official documents as a profession. I have been in this profession for
almost 55 years.”
Alshamaileh explained
that his duties include writing out official documents for anyone that wants to
purchase land or replace an ID or a passport, etc.
“There is no guarantee
(of payment),” he said. “If you want to have a guarantee, you must pay a large
sum of money, and there is no union for us. So, we do not get anything.”
The digital era isn’t
the first time the profession has run into trouble. “There was an
administrative body at the beginning of 1997, they were preventing us from
working,” recalled Alshamaileh. “I remember that once they took the chairs,
tables, and the printing machine. They also took us to a security center. But
the senior officers were with us, and they were saying that we had valid
licenses from the Public Security Directorate and the General Intelligence
Directorate. After that there were no problems.”
According to
Alshamaileh, a clerk “is a legal officer like lawyers and judges.” He explained
that each member of the profession must obtain a license valued at half a dinar
annually. “However, the governor has the right to revoke any license at any
time due to misconduct or if a writer uses offensive language in any official
documents that he writes.”
Another clerk,
Abdelfattah, told Jordan News that he has been working for 17
years since he first obtained his license.
“I chose this
profession for two reasons: first, my age, because I can no longer endure
long-term or nighttime hours and the working hours are not that long,” said
Abdelfattah. “Secondly, this profession offers good financial income and is better
than other freelance work.”
He added that “The
future of this profession is good when people view this job with respect and
appreciation,” and not as a job done strictly for monetary purposes.
But sometimes, he
said, auditors or other customers do not respect or value his work. “They do
not know how to give me the detailed information needed to help them, and they
take other people’s time, and when they finish their document, they don’t want
to pay the documents fee,” he said.
“The official document
clerk sits under the scorching sun,” he added. “If there was a suitable indoor
air-conditioned room, it would enable the writer to do a better job.”
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