Dhaka proposes to KL to save workers from middlemen
Dhaka has proposed to Kuala Lumpur to recruit Bangladeshi workers under government arrangements to cut involvement of middlemen to reduce the cost of their going abroad for jobs and to put an end to their exploitation.
Malaysian Human Resources Minister Datuk Seri Dr S Subramaniam has termed “attractive” the proposal made to him by Bangladesh Expatriates’ Welfare Minister Khandker Mosharraf Hossain, reports Malaysian official news agency Bernama.
During a meeting with Subramaniam in Putrajaya, Mosharraf, who is on a five-day visit to Malaysia, said Bangladesh government will register all the overseas jobseekers and act as a facilitator in matching the employers’ needs with the workers’ qualifications, Bernama reported yesterday.
“It is an attractive suggestion. They (Bangladesh) said they have done it with other countries, where the government maintained a profile of the potential workers and, when they received a request from a certain country, they can sort the request, which will contribute to a smoother process at lower cost, with greater amount of protection for both workers and employers,” Subramaniam said.
He said he was thankful to Bangladesh for introducing a “very good mechanism” to reduce the cost of sending workers overseas. The proposal would be discussed by the cabinet committee on foreign workers and illegal immigrants to work out ways to implement the new intervention, he added.
Mosharraf said high cost of migration had been identified as the major cause of the problems of workers. They usually could not return home in time because they could not recover the cost, and this made them overstay their visa period.
He mentioned that the government was aware of this and had come up with the idea to ensure a reasonable migration cost for the workers.
Presently, there are over four lakh Bangladeshi workers in Malaysia. Of them, 270,000 are irregular, and have got registered with the Malaysian immigration authorities for getting regularised.
Subramaniam said the presence of 2.7 lakh irregular Bangladeshi workers indicated problems in the recruitment process, and it was good that Bangladesh government suggested a system to overcome those.
And Malaysian Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishamuddin Hussein has said Kuala Lumpur and Dhaka would share intelligence on the movement of Bangladeshi workers between the two countries, reports Malaysian daily The Star Online.
He said a team of security and finance experts would visit Bangladesh within two weeks to work out strategies to tackle human trafficking syndicates.
“The meeting (during its visit) will work out an operational framework where the two countries can exchange information and track down known and suspected traffickers, known as dalal in Bangladesh,” Hishamuddin said.
Meanwhile, Malaysia is likely to reopen its labour market soon. It imposed restriction on recruiting Bangladeshi workers in early 2009 following alleged malpractices in the process.
-With The Daily Star input
