Middlemen behind Middle East woes
A clique of unscrupulous middlemen between employers and workers has developed in overseas job markets over the years and is mainly responsible for numerous forms of abuse of Bangladeshi expatriates in the Middle East.
In the '80s when Bangladesh officially began sending workers to the Middle Eastern countries, the employers used to bear all necessary costs. But with the expansion of labour market, a section of Bangladeshi migrants emerged and got involved in trade of work visas, experts say.
At one stage, these brokers started competing with themselves to collect visas by offering higher payment and low-salaried workers to the employers. Some employers also became partners of the illegal trade, which is now contributing to the increase of workers' cost for overseas jobs and decrease in salaries.
According to industry insiders, monthly salary of low-skilled workers in Saudi Arabia is only 300 to 400 Saudi riyals (SR), which was average SR 1,000 earlier, and 20 to 25 dinar (KD) in Kuwait.
However, the workers have to spend on an average Tk 2-3 lakh and most of this money is gobbled up by the middlemen.
"These days selling visas by the Kuwaiti individuals and companies for a minimum of KD 300 to KD 700 has become a profitable business. So, in order to sell more visas, there is a tendency among the Kuwaiti employers to bring more workers than requirement," said a former official of Bangladesh Embassy in Kuwait.
A handful of Bangladeshis who became millionaire staying in Kuwait for 20 to 25 years invest huge amount of money in the form of advance booking with some big companies to supply manpower from Bangladesh, he said.
Whenever workers are needed, these companies secure work visas from their government and ask these brokers to get people from Bangladesh. The illegal traders then sell visas to recruiting agencies or middlemen in Bangladesh at higher cost, which eventually falls on the aspiring jobseekers.
When the visas are available, the recruiting agencies or middlemen in Bangladesh have their lower-end middlemen to collect village workers by promising higher salary and other facilities.
"Due to absence of proper authentication system in the recruiting process in Bangladesh, the unfortunate Bangladeshis fall victim to these unscrupulous traders," the former embassy official said.
Workers, mostly low-skilled ones, get so low wages that they cannot recover the money they spend and are forced to resort to illegal jobs. The employers can also exploit them by deducting from salaries, forcing to do overtime jobs without benefits and by not granting leave.
"In Kuwait, we started a system that all the visas must be attested by the embassy, but still there are cases that workers come for jobs without having their visas attested," Shahriar Kader Siddiky, labour counsellor of Bangladesh Embassy in Kuwait, told The Daily Star.
The visas used for hiring extra workers are called "free visas". The influential brokers collect these visas from the employers saying they would take care of the extra workers.
"But the manpower brokers neither take care of them nor help them find jobs," said a recruiting agent.
According to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, the migrants who arrive in Saudi Arabia with "free visas" must find work on their own.
Quoting the Arab News, it says dozens of companies in the Eastern Province of the Kingdom alone 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 trade. Individual Kuwaitis are no exception to this ill practice."
Besides, some agencies in Bangladesh also process documents and send workers abroad without checking their skill as required by the employers. This ultimately leads to their deportation and earns bad reputation for the country, the former official added.
Asked if Bangladesh took any initiative to check the issue of middlemen, Expatriates' Welfare and Overseas Employment Secretary Abdul Matin Chowdhury said the government was negotiating the issue with the recruiting agencies but has not come to any decision yet.
"Manpower receiving countries, however, have to come forward to stop the middlemen in their ends," he observed.
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