Brokers make visas, job papers costlier

Middlemen and employers are extorting high prices for visas and job approvals from jobseekers in the Middle East and Malaysia, gradually destroying the overseas labour markets--lifeline of the country's economy.
In addition to paying extra amount, the workers also get low wages, which create in them a tendency to switch jobs, do part-time work in violation of laws and even commit crime.
Such activities highly irritate the employers and the host countries, ultimately creating obstacles to sending workers abroad, say officials and industry insiders.
According to them, these practices are the major reasons that Kuwait stopped recruiting workers from Bangladesh in late 2006 and Malaysia imposed restrictions on hiring Bangladeshi workers in late 2007.
Saudi Arabia on Sunday announced it has limited recruitment of Bangladeshis to establishments that need qualified personnel in the medical and engineering fields. Besides, the Kingdom has set workers' quota at 20 percent in cleaning and maintenance jobs only for establishments having contracts with government.
Ghulam Mostafa, former secretary general of Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies, at a recent seminar expressed the apprehension Bangladesh might lose the major labour markets if authorities fail to correct the flawed system and hold immediate dialogues with these countries.
In the 1980s when Bangladesh officially started sending workers abroad, employers charged the workers not a single penny for visas. Moreover, monthly salaries also ranged from Saudi riyals (SR) 800 to SR 1,000 for jobs in Saudi Arabia.
In contrast, the workers, especially the unskilled section, now have to pay the agents Tk 2-3 lakh for an overseas job and end up in getting low salaries. Workers' salary has now come down to 300-400 riyals in the Kingdom, officials and industry insiders say.
This is the result of unholy competition among the middlemen in buying visas from the employers and competition in offering workers low salaries, they observe.
Taking advantage of such competition, many employers in the Middle Eastern countries also indulge in selling visas to earn huge amounts out of no investment, agents and studies say.
Some foreign employers even secure more employment visas than their actual need. They sell these visas to foreign workers but cannot employ them, leaving the helpless workers on their own, according to industry insiders and studies.
"These extra visas are popularly known as free visas," said a recruiting agent.
He cited an example, saying if a company needs 200 workers, Bangladeshi manpower broker persuades it to make it 300. The broker offers 5,000 riyals for each visa and assures the employer that they would take care of the workers, he added.
"The employer finds the offer very lucrative and acts accordingly. But the manpower broker neither takes care of these extra workers nor helps them manage jobs."
According to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, the migrants who arrive in the Kingdom with "free visas" must find their own work and remit monthly payments to the Saudi sponsor named on their visas.
It is impossible to estimate how many times the same employment visa is sold in schemes designed to dupe vulnerable migrant workers, the report notes.
Quoting the Arab News, it says in the Eastern Province alone, there are dozens of companies, which exist only on papers. On the basis of their registration and licence, they apply for visas only to sell those.
The report also says quoting an official who worked in Kuwait, "Most of the Kuwaiti companies issue work permits for excess workers to make money out of visa trading. Individual Kuwaitis are no exception to this ill practice."
Adnan Al-Naeim, a business leader in Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, told the Saudi Gazette on February 15 this year: "There is a trail of visa trading, which is hurting legitimate Saudi employers... visas are being traded on the black market by big interest groups."
A research by a Malaysian migrants' rights organisation, Tenaganita, finds that job approvals were issued against demands of companies that are existent only on papers, resulting in unemployment of hundreds of Bangladeshi workers in the country.
"Some genuine companies also hired extra workers that benefited only the agents and the employers," said Tenaganita official Harun Al Rashid. Bangladesh High Commission in Kuala Lumpur also did not verify the process correctly, he said.
The cost for each worker for going to Malaysia was fixed at Tk 84,000 but they paid Tk 2 lakh to Tk 2.5 lakh.
Such flaws in the recruitment process seriously irritated Malaysian government that led to the imposition of the restrictions, he added.