Shakhawat Hossain
The government has decided to make compulsory the registration of the overseas job seekers with a public office before their engagement with the private manpower recruiting agencies.
The decision has been taken to curb the sub-recruiting by the local agencies which was found a potential threat to the expanding overseas market for the Bangladeshi job seekers.
‘The registration is expected to bring discipline to the manpower recruitment process of the local agencies, which are engaged in sub-recruiting,’ expatriates’ welfare and overseas employment minister, Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain told New Age on Sunday.
At present, the overseas job seekers register with the government’s Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training before their departure.
The existing registration rules create openings for sub-recruiting by the local agencies, which take much higher amount of money than the government fixed fee from the overseas job seekers, experts said.
The recent announcement of the cancellation of 55,000 visas for the Bangladeshi workers by the Malaysian government might have connection with the sub-recruiting, they opined.
‘We are hopeful that the overseas job seekers will be benefited by the new registration rules,’ said the minister.
The new registration system will be implemented by the BMET and it has been taken up at the suggestion of a probe committee, which found the sub-recruiting system a potential threat to the growing overseas market for the Bangladeshi job seekers.
Nearly 400,000 Bangladeshi job seekers went to Malaysia since 2006. They were mostly engaged in construction and plantation sector of the south-east Asian country.
The announcement of the cancellation of visas is a major blow to the Bangladesh’s overseas job recruitment as the country received $9 billion in remittances in the last fiscal year.
About 65 per cent of the remittances were sent by the expatriates from the Middle-eastern countries, while the rest came from the Malaysia, USA and the European countries.
The officials of the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies, however, said the new rules might not bring any major change to the country’s gloomy manpower export scenario.
BAIRA president, Ghulam Mustafa, said the current global recession might reduce the overseas job seekers from Bangladesh almost to half by 2009.
BAIRA secretary general, KM Mofizur Rahman, said nearly 800 recruiting agencies were already following the existing rules and regulations.
He suggested that the government should explore new destinations as the country’s traditional overseas job employers were shutting their doors in the backdrop of the global financial crisis.
The country sent 8,75,055 job seekers abroad in 2008.
Courtesy of www.newagebd.com
