Law soon to stop incidents of fleeing workplaces
With lucrative job markets opening up in East Europe, the government is framing a law to prevent overseas Bangladeshi workers from fleeing their workplaces, a trend that recently caused problems to the country's labour market abroad.
The initiative has been taken after at least 67 Bangladeshi workers in Romania fled their workplaces.
Romania is employing around 600 Bangladeshi workers all of who went to that country this year for jobs with monthly salary of $450 each besides other facilities including free meals, accommodation and healthcare. Highly skilled workers can get up to a salary of $3,000 a month, according to a recruiting agency.
Employers of Bulgaria and Poland have also sent proposals for recruiting workers from Bangladesh in the construction sector, an official of the expatriates' welfare and overseas employment ministry told The Daily Star.
Romania, Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary will require around five lakh workers in garment and construction sectors in the next year as their own workers are migrating to West European countries like the UK and France for higher-paying jobs. The migration tendency is the result of these countries' joining the European Union, said a foreign ministry official quoting Bangladesh Embassy in France.
"The European labour market is much more profitable for us than jobs in many Middle Eastern countries, because we can send to these countries skilled and semi-skilled workers who can earn higher," the official said.
Bangladesh has a good number of workers with skills and experience in the garment and construction sectors. Many more are getting trained every year, he noted.
"But, the problem is that our workers tend to run away from workplaces. A few incidents are enough to destroy our labour market in the European countries," the official said.
Therefore, the foreign ministry has asked the Law Commission to draft a law to prevent overseas workers from fleeing their workplaces violating contracts they sign with their employers, he added.
An inter-ministerial meeting held on Tuesday at the expatriates' welfare ministry adopted a resolution that a law should be framed so that the government can sue the runaway workers.
When contacted yesterday, Expatriates' Welfare Secretary Abdul Matin Chowdhury, who chaired the meeting, said, "We are trying to collect laws of other countries that bring overseas workers under certain obligations."
The meeting recommended making it mandatory for the guardians of each worker going for overseas jobs to submit a bond worth Tk 10 lakh and fixed deposit receipt of Tk 1 lakh to the Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training.
"If any worker flees their workplaces violating contracts, the money will be confiscated," Matin said, adding that government officials would also be engaged in the process of selecting workers for overseas jobs.
The foreign ministry official told The Daily Star that the meeting also recommended preserving fingerprints of all workers going abroad so that they can be identified upon their return. "Fleeing workers will be arrested when they return to Bangladesh and punished as per the law," he said.
"When European employers negotiate for hiring workers from Bangladesh on bilateral basis they want to be sure that our workers will return after their contracts expire," Matin said. "Europe is a new market and we must make the best use of it."
He said, "As sending workers under WTO arrangement is difficult for its multilateral approach, we should deal with the labour market issue very carefully with European markets."
Bangladesh received nearly $8 billion last fiscal year from overseas Bangladeshi workers, the largest net remittance earning sources of the country.
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