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Download PDF Excessive cost of finding overseas employments and fraud lead to situations where workers find themselves in debt and enter indentured and slave-like labour, said International Labour Organisation (ILO).
“Most blame this on profit margins of recruitment agents, but it is also due to high transaction costs–passports, work permits, documentation,” said ILO Director in Dhaka, Panudda Boonpala, yesterday at the inaugural session of a symposium titled “Deployment of workers overseas: A shared responsibility”.
In cases where employers pay agencies recruitment costs in advance, there are complaints of unacceptable salary deductions, while in order to pay back their recruiters, workers often go unpaid for months or years, she said.
Representatives from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, United Arab Emirates, South Korea and Sri Lanka are participating in the two-day symposium organised by the ILO and the Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment in cooperation with Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.
Welcoming the participants, ILO Director Boonpala said the other area of concern is the lack of legal status, which makes workers more vulnerable to exploitation and severely limits their avenues for services. Around one-third Asian migrants working in Asia are considered irregular, she added.
Stating that policies have failed to sufficiently protect the rights and interests of migrant workers and their families despite their immense positive value in economy and society, Boonpala said women and young workers are especially vulnerable to violence, sexual harassment and abuses as well as HIV/AIDS.
Therefore, ILO’s cooperation and support for the Asian migration agenda requires a concerted effort in developing country roadmaps for the development of labour migration as part of a long-term development strategy, strengthening labour inspection and bilateral cooperation to improve recruitment practices, she said.
Speaking as the special guest, Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment Secretary Abdul Matin Chowdhury said involvement of multi-layered middlemen in both sending and destination countries increase the cost of migration and frauds.
Therefore, it is not possible for any single country to curb these practices and requires close cooperation between the sending and receiving countries to protect rights of the migrants, he said.
“We need close and effective collaboration for effective migration management. I hope ILO will continue to arrange dialogues encompassing labour sending and receiving countries,” he added.
He noted that Bangladesh sent 8.32 lakh workers to various countries for jobs and earned $6.57 billion last year and by the end of this year, the number of workers abroad is likely to cross 10 lakh.
Swiss Ambassador to Bangladesh Dora Rapold said considering the high importance of migration for most of the economies, rights of migrants is a challenge in most countries.
“This requires regional exchange and cooperation,” she said, adding that Bangladesh with abundant manpower force depends on peoples’ migration, but these people often have a lot of pressure to succeed abroad. They should be taken care of so that they may have decent jobs and overcome poverty, she said.
National Coordination Committee for Workers Education Member Secretary Mesbahudin Ahmed said the recruiting agencies could earlier collect job demands from the employers directly, but now the middlemen make the recruitment process costlier and more troublesome.
Bangladesh Employers’ Federation Secretary General CK Hyder said economic, political and demographic factors indicate that temporary labour migration will be more dominant in the coming years.
“To ensure fair deals, there should be more systematic discussions on the relevant issues under the auspices of ILO,” he said.
October 4th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Comparisons with administrative records of benefit receipt can be difficult to interpret,
because alternative explanations of differences include: inaccurate recording of benefit
receipt in the FES; administrative counts including those not in private households; or being affected by fraudulent receipt including multiple identity fraud.
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