Bangladesh News

Bangladesh is going to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the government of United Arab Emirates (UAE) shortly that aims at mitigating the sufferings of the Bangladeshi expatriate workers.

The UAE Labour Minister Dr Ali Abdullah Al Kaabi will visit Bangladesh in the first week of December in this connection, said a source in the Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment.

In a letter to the Health and Family Welfare Adviser Dr Sufia Rahman on November 21, Bangladeshi Ambassador to the UAE Nazimullah Chowdhury said that the UAE labour minister called him and discussed the proposed new labour laws of the country, which focus on improving the condition of the expatriate workers.

The MoU is going to be signed at a time when there are reports of widespread violations of human rights of the migrant workers in the UAE, especially in the country’s construction industry.

According to New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), these abuses include unpaid or extremely low wages, several years of indebtedness to the recruitment agencies for paying up fees that UAE law says only the employers should pay, the withholding of the workers’ passports and hazardous working conditions that result in apparently high rates of death and injury.

Most of the UAE’s 500,000 migrant construction workers come from South Asian countries, including Bangladesh, the report says.

The embassies of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh repatriated the bodies of 880 construction workers in 2004, HRW said, adding that the UAE government can account for only a few of these deaths ‘primarily because it appears not to enforce its own laws requiring employers to report worksite deaths and injuries.’

“Recruiting agencies unlawfully force the workers, rather than their employers, to pay $2,000-3,000 for travel, visas, government fees and the recruiters’ own services,” the report said adding that the migrant workers do not benefit from the country’s minimum wage, earning between $106-250 a month compared with a national average of $2,106, HRW said.

The MoU likely to be signed would enable the expatriate workers to get better service conditions such as regular salary, health insurance, accommodation, opportunity to move from one sponsor to another in case of non-payment of salary and dispute settlement mechanism, the letter of the ambassador said.

“It would develop a new system for bringing workforce into the country based on coordination between the UAE and the labour sending country concerned,” the letter said adding that the labour contract between the worker and the employer will be authenticated by the UAE Labour Ministry to minimise the sufferings of the workers and to eradicate the abuses.

This will also help to end the shady practice of fake contracts that exploit the workers, the ambassador further noted in the letter.

“Besides regulating the overseas manpower employment, the proposed MoU will help open up a new era of cooperation between our two governments and strengthen bilateral relations of the two countries,” Ambassador Nazimullah Chowdhury said in his letter.

According to official statistics, there are nearly 5 lakh Bangladeshis working in the UAE, which is the second largest job market for the Bangladeshi workers overseas.

In the last fiscal year, the expatriate workers remitted over $553 million to Bangladesh.