BANGLADESH is hopeful that Malaysia will adopt an open system that allows all licensed agencies in the country to send workers to Malaysia free of cost or at minimum cost as Malaysian Home Minister Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail visits Bangladesh on Feb 4.
Saifuddin is poised to meet Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment Minister Imran Ahmad Imran Ahmad and is also likely to call on the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed. He will be visiting Dhaka on the third leg of his visit after Indonesia and Nepal as Malaysia is aggressively seeking to recruit foreign labour to boost its economy.
‘We will want an arrangement so that our people can go to Malaysia for jobs fast and at low cost,” Imran had told Dhaka-based news portal The Daily Star. “(The) Bangladesh Association for International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA) is also wishing to meet Minister Saifuddin during his one-day visit here.”
Under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) inked last year with former human resources minister Datuk Seri M. Saravanan, Bangladesh sent around only 60,000 workers (though job demand letters were issued for around 200,000 workers) but even that came at a very high cost.
Industry insiders and migrant workers said the recruitment cost for each worker is now 400,000 taka (RM16,036) to 450,000 taka (RM18.040). Only 100 recruiting agencies are currently allowed by the Malaysian government to send workers.
Earlier in 2018, the then Pakatan Harapan (PH) government had frozen the intake of recruitment from Bangladesh on allegations of forced labour, syndication and high recruitment cost.
BAIRA general secretary Shameem Ahmed Chowdhury Noman told The Daily Star that the association has already written to the expatriates’ welfare ministry with the proposal of introducing an open recruitment system so that all licensed recruiting agencies – some 1,200 in number – can send their workers to Malaysia.
“Responsible Business Association – a forum of big companies that send workers to western countries – is recruiting workers from Nepal and Malaysia free of cost,” revealed Noman to The Daily Star.
“We would like to take this opportunity. We don’t want to follow the previous IT system that monopolises the recruitment.”
Echoing a similar sentiment, BAIRA executive committee member Ali Haider Chowdhury hoped that Malaysia’s new government “is seeking a change and we also want it to happen (that way)”.
While in Dhaka, Saifuddin who is also a senator, may call on the Bangladeshi Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen. “We want the labour recruitment cartel to be dismantled, the recruitment cost reduced and the rules of recruitment eased,” Abdul Momen had told journalists yesterday (Jan 30) at his ministry. – Jan 31, 2023
