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Manpower sector looks down the barrel

Recruitment slips to half for global meltdown, unscrupulous middlemen

Porimol Palma
Poor labour recruitment arrangements coupled with ongoing financial meltdown have dealt a double blow to overseas employment, which is moving towards a precarious state.
On an average, monthly 46,288 jobseekers left the country in the last three months, while the same rate was 75,516 in the first eleven months of 2008, according to the Bureau of Manpower Employment andTYaining (BMET).
Malaysia, home to around 4 lakh Bangladeshis, has recently cancelled work visas of 55,000 jobseekers, adding to the woes due to a shrinking job market.
Besides, workers who paid high cost for overseas jobs are returning home empty-handed in increased numbers.
They complain that they were not provided jobs and given only what was necessary for survival in Malaysia or Singapore.
Thousands of workers in these two countries are also unemployed as the agents had hired them in higher numbers than the actual requirement to squeeze moneyoutofthem.
Employers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bangladesh's second largest labour market with around 9 lakh workforce, are either sending back workers on long-term vacation or cutting salary due to slowdown in construction projects.
Businesses and experts say overseas employment might come down to 4 lakh this year against 8.75 lakh last year. Remittance sent by expatriates stood to
around $9 billion, the highest foreign exchange earning in real term.
"This will surely be affected if employment declines and retrenchment of migrant workers continues. Besides, no new employment opportunities are being created at home. Things will be worse if the crisis lingers," says Bangladesh Economic Association President Prof QK Ahmad.
Experts concerned say the situation would not be so bad had the successive governments handled the manpower sector properly and regulated the multilayered middlemen, who hike the cost of migration but help make the labourers cheap to the employers.
"Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain now have full or partial bans on recruiting
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Bangladeshi workers. These bans had no link with current financial downtrend," says a recruiting agent.
Saudi Arabia, which is home to around 20 lakh Bangladeshis, significantly reduced recruitment from Bangladesh in March. It used to recruit 5,000 to 7,000 workers a month in the previous years, but the number has come down to 1,000-1,500 now.
There are now around 2 lakh Bangladeshis in Kuwait, which used to recruit monthly around 3,000 workers, but hired only 319 Bangladeshis throughout last year.
On the other hand, by partial ban, Bahrain also recruited not more than 1,100 workers monthly last year, while the number was around 1,300 earlier.
Businesses say when international racketeers dominate the recruitment process workers get exploited and engaged in crime that annoys the host countries.
"Recruitment bans by the three Gulf countries were surely linked to such reasons and negligence of our foreign missions," a recruiting agent observes.
"As buy-and-sale of job approvals brings huge profit, agents (unlicensed brokers) buy more job approvals or visas for more profit," says a manpower broker in Malaysia.
The cancellation of 55,000 visas by Malaysia is not only for economic reason, he adds. Many Bangladeshis were left
unemployed and they stayed in the open, while many others were kept in go downs' in Malaysia. These annoyed the Malaysian government, he notes.
About unemployment of Bangladeshis in Singapore, a Singaporean rights activist said, "It is not for recession, but because they were brought as extra workers."
When Malaysia froze intake of Bangladeshis on October 3 in 2007, the country's then home minister Datuk Seri Mohd Radzi Sheikh Ahmad commented, "The presence of too many agents from Bangladesh in Malaysia, who used Malaysians as subagents, and the huge amount of money involved, is not a healthy sign, it is not good for Lhe country."
Kuwait’s Labour Minister Sabah Khaled AL Hamd Al Sabah in an occasion in 2007 expressed annoyance over unscrupulous agencies and said they were facing problems in recruiting labour from Bangladesh.
Nasser al-Abdali, head of the Kuwaiti Society for the Development of Democracy, said visa trading in Kuwait was worth about three billion dollars annually and charged that officials facilitated the illegal trade, reported the Arab Times on August 24 last year.
"We are concerned over recruiting workers, but not making sure that they get good salaries and are not exploited,” says Sakiul Millat Morshed, a migration expert.