Bangladesh hopes to send 500,000 workers to M’sia

DHAKA, June 25 (NsNewsWire) —  Bangladesh expects to recruit 500,000 workers over the next six months to work in Malaysia under a new recruitment agreement hammered out by the two countries on Wednesday.

The workers would be offered a three-year contract with the option to extend it by another year, reports www.freemalaysiatoday.com.

The new agreement was hastened by the recent influx of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar by boat that precipitated a humanitarian crisis that attracted international attention.

According to an official of Bangladesh’s expatriates’ welfare and overseas employment ministry, the earlier government-to-government (G2G) system, agreed upon in November 2012, “failed to live up to the Bangladeshi workers’ expectation”.

Over 100,000 Bangladeshis were reportedly victims of manpower touts and human traffickers in the last two years.

“Under the new agreement, called Business-to-Business (B-B) mechanism, recruitment can be run through private recruitment agencies of the two countries,” said Kazi Abul Kalam, joint secretary of the ministry, in a report carried in The Daily Star yesterday.

Bangladesh Expatriates Welfare Minister Khandker Mosharraf Hossain and Malaysian Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi signed the agreement in Putrajaya.

Zahid said legal workers from Bangladesh are welcome in Malaysia and applications for employment would be received online and monitored by local government agencies.

Khandker said the new agreement would ensure that would-be workers were not exploited or charged unreasonable fees, while employers would be made responsible for the welfare and security of the workers.

When the old agreement was signed in 2012, Khandker had then said that at least 50,000 Bangladeshis would be sent to Malaysia within a year and 100,000 by the following year.

The Bangladeshi Manpower Employment and Training Department has set up an online database for workers with more than 1.4 million registering. However only 7,000 have been sent to Malaysia since April 2013.

Malaysia had earlier put in restrictions that limited new Bangladeshi workers to seek employment only in plantations and not in other sectors.