Dream turns to nightmare for 3 lakh Bangladeshis

The hopes of changing fortune with which around 3 lakh Bangladeshi workers have migrated to Malaysia are likely to be dashed due to high cost of migration, low wage offered by their employers and high cost of living there.
A calculation suggests that the three-pronged problem would leave most of the migrant labour with savings far less than they had spent to go to the East Asian country.
Though the government-fixed rate was Tk 84,000, each worker had been charged between Tk 2 lakh and 2.5 lakh by their recruiting agents and middlemen for migration.
Upon completing the usual three-year contract period, a worker can save only around Tk 1.5 lakh after paying his daily expenses and levy, according to the calculation.
The misfortune of the workers does not end here as they took out loans at high interest rate to arrange the migration fees, experts observe adding that the price of the land they sold for going to Malaysia have almost doubled.
It is unlikely that these workers will be able to recover the money they had put in hoping for a successful future, they added.
Considering Malaysian Ringgit (RM) 18.5 as basic salary per day as per the employment contracts, a worker gets about RM 500 or Tk 10,000, monthly for 26 working days, meaning he earns Tk 3,60,000 in three years.
However, a worker has to pay over RM 300 for levy, food, housing and medicines in Malaysia leaving only RM 150 to RM 200 for sending home in a month, said Mohammad Harun-Al Rashid, a Bangladeshi labour rights activist and migration expert working in Malaysia for about a decade.
This means a worker saves not more than Tk 1,44,000 in three years. "I want to say clearly that it's impossible for the Bangladeshi workers to recover the money they spent for going to Malaysia in next three years," he said.
This calculation can also be justified by a statistics of the national bank in Malaysia that shows that the foreigners over there, including the skilled ones from developed countries, remit RM 200 on average in a month, Harun-Al Rashid, also the programme officer Tenaganita, a migrants rights organisation in Malaysia, added.
"And I am talking about only those getting paid regularly, but there are thousands of instances of underpayment, non-payments and even unemployment in the cases of Bangladeshi workers," the labour rights expert said.
In the face of various problems, almost 60 percent of the Bangladeshi workers will return in phases in three years, Harun-Al Rashid further observed saying that it is a risk for Bangladesh to send its labour under these circumstances.
Asked if there are scopes for overtime in the jobs, he said it depends on the workers whether they choose to work overtime or not and no company should consider it mandatory.
Exploring further, migration expert Sakiul Millat Morshed said that the interest rate of the loans that the workers take from rural lenders is usually 10 percent a month, meaning if a worker had borrowed Tk 1 lakh, he has to pay more than Tk 1 lakh simply as interest.
On the other hand, the price of a piece of land that the worker might have sold for Tk 1 lakh, might be almost doubled in three years, observed Morshed, also the executive director of Shikkha Shastha Unnayan Karzakram (Shishuk), an NGO.
A big portion of the money that the workers had spent has been smuggled to Malaysia in the form of hundi for Malaysian middlemen, he said adding that the middlemen in Bangladesh also devoured another part depriving the government of huge amount of revenue.
Harun-Al Rashid, who had dealt extensively with the migrant labour problems in Malaysia, said that the Bangladeshi recruiting agencies are engaged in immoral competition and they offer or are forced to pay high amounts to the Malaysian agents or companies in getting job approvals.
Outsourcing agents in Malaysia are also eating up a significant part of the workers' earnings, he said. "For example, a principal company pays the outsourcing company RM 30 for each worker per day, but the outsourcing agents take more than one-third share from it. Contracts between the outsourcing agents and principal companies are also made accordingly."
Bangladesh must study the policies and laws of the country before it sends its workers there for jobs, he said.
"Overseas employment for Bangladeshis under such circumstances is only an addition to poverty cycle," Sakiul Millat Morshed observed.
Dr CR Abrar, coordinator of Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU) of Dhaka University, said he has not made any such calculation, but it appears to be quite convincing.
"If that is really the case, the government should immediately sit with Malaysia and find a way out," he said.