Manpower export from Bangladesh
September 12, 2008
must congratulate Helal Ahmed Chowdhury, Managing Director of Pubali Bank, for coming up with a very innovative scheme for funding the prospective job seekers abroad. A substantial number of the expatriate wage earners are victims of the unscrupulous manpower agents who extract substantial sums from job seekers for employment abroad. Pubali Bank has initiated an expatriate lending project whereby the bank will advance money to the prospective job seekers who will repay the loan from their remittances.
I do have some personal experience regarding manpower export. It just so happens that when Bangladesh commenced exporting manpower and introduced the manpower license system my license number was number one. That is to say that I was the first to get hold of a manpower export license.
I was under the impression that we would be paid by the company that recruited workers from Bangladesh. I soon find out that it was the other way round. I had to pay money to the agents of the company-recruiting workers. Naturally, this had to be borne by the aspirant of a foreign job.
Since I could not accept the situation I surrendered my license. Some years later, when I started contracting work in the Emirates, I got a fresh license and I took at least 500 skilled workers and engineers without any charge, including payment of their airfare.
I happened to be to the promoter director of Al-Baraka Bank with the Dallah Group of Saudi Arabia as the foreign partner. Every year, at least four board meetings used to be held in Jeddah and, over the years, I attended at least 20 such meetings.
I found the Dallah Group to be a very enlightened business conglomerate working in at least a dozen countries. They were a larges employer and did not charge any money from the recruits. From the Bangladesh side, we have Bangladesh Overseas Employment and Services Limited (BOESL), which is supposed to act as the recruiting agent in Bangladesh.
I am not familiar with the proportion of workers that go abroad through the BOESL, but I would imagine it would be a small fraction only. Also, BOESL simply does not have the funding and the facilities needed to contact all prospective employers abroad and to search for avenues of employment in new countries.
When we were working in Abu Dhabi, the Labour Counsellor in the Bangladesh Embassy would frequently request us for transport if he wished to visit Dubai. In other words, the embassy did not have cars or funds for the Labour Counsellor to visit prospective employers and, if possible, take them out for dinner.
This is probably the situation in every Bangladesh Embassy abroad. Therefore, this calls for the involvement of some agencies that would promote employment of Bangladesh workers, particularly skilled ones, in the large number of prospective employer countries. In this matter the government may give all facilities to BOESL, and maybe also involve NGOs like Brac and Grameen Bank to promote employment of Bangladesh workers abroad.
The whole question of manpower export has been analysed by the Royal Danish Embassy, Dhaka, in their report Vision 2015, Bangladesh as a leading manpower exporter January 2008, and by Bangladesh Enterprise Institute in their study September 2007 on Policy and Public Benefit Interventions, to help Bangladesh achieve annual migrant remittances of $ 30 billion by 2015, and also in a report by India Institute of Management Calcutta September 2007.
From these reports it can be seen that the possibilities of manpower export are enormous. For example, there is a worldwide shortage of qualified nurses, and Bangladesh has got practically millions of unemployed women. Other skilled workers like carpenters, plumbers, auto-mechanics, air-conditioning technicians, and so the list goes on. Also qualified technical workers like IT engineers, computer experts etc.
We have to acknowledge that Bangladesh is practically surviving on the remittances of Bangladesh workers. The total remittance in the year 2006-2007 was $ 5979 million, and the remittance for the period July-December 2007 was $ 3447 million. In other words, for the year 2007-2008 the remittance is likely to exceed $ 7 billion. Unfortunately, although the government and the country are reaping huge benefits from wage earners’ remittances, not enough is being done to administer the whole business of manpower export, which is really the goose that is laying the golden egg.
On January 10, 2008, I was travelling to Karachi by PIA. In the 30 seats of the Business Class there were only 5 genuine business class passengers and the rest were workers. There were 2 captains sitting behind me, and when I enquired if the other passengers had paid the full business class fare the captains replied in the affirmative.
I talked to the person sitting beside me and asked him about the purpose of his journey. He said that he was going to work as a labourer in Abu Dhabi and would be paid only 650 Dirhams per month. I recalled that in 1990 we were paying our workers a minimum salary of 1250 Dirhams.
On further enquiry I found out that the person next to me had neither any schooling nor vocational training. He had paid Tk 2.5 lacs for the job. Two things are revealed in this disclosure — the worker was not skilled and it would take him at least 5 years to recover his investment. The nexus of agents in Bangladesh and abroad would be the main beneficiaries.
Unless we break this nexus our skilled workers, who might command better salaries but cannot pay the premium, are deprived from the jobs and, secondly, a considerable amount of foreign exchange is paid through the backdoor to the agents abroad. All this money would have come to Bangladesh as workers’ remittances.
If one examines the whole manpower business in depth one would find numerous underhanded dealings, both by our recruiting agents and the agents abroad. False passports, false visas, false recruitments proliferate on our side. And overseas, if a company has 100 vacancies the foreign agents may take out permission for 1000 vacancies, and our workers who land up in the foreign country are left stranded without a job. We read frequently about these happenings in the newspapers.
Presently, almost all job seekers are hostage to the unscrupulous recruiting agents in Bangladesh and also to their counterparts in the country of employment. Actually, most large companies and government agencies abroad do not charge any money from the workers they employ.
The lower employees of the overseas companies tie up with some local agents and charge money for any recruitment. The entire business of manpower export requires review and professional management as Bangladesh can benefit much more than we are at present. The reports mentioned above should be studied and the measures suggested implemented.
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