Not jobs, they want to return home

After remaining jobless for eight months, at least 30 Bangladeshi migrant workers in conflict-torn Iraq have refused to take up any new work and demanded their recruiting agency bring them back to Dhaka.

Md Rafik, one of the 30 workers, told this correspondent on Wednesday over the phone that they had already submitted their resignation letters to the recruiting agency.

Career Overseas Consultants Ltd, a Bangladeshi recruiting agency, had sent a total of 180 migrant workers to Iraq, promising them jobs at Abu Torab Housing Project in Najaf, a desert area in the restive country.

Of them, 117 were sent in May last year. They have since remained jobless as the housing project was delayed by the construction company concerned, agency sources said.

However, the 30 workers who have resigned alleged they were not only stranded at the housing company's labour camp but also had been suffering from poor supply of food, water and electricity. 

“Since June 2014, the agency has been saying they will provide us with jobs in one or two months. But they couldn't do that in the last eight months. Besides, we are having to stay within the boundary of this camp like prisoners,” engineer Siddique, who represented the workers, told The Daily Star over the phone.

The Bangladeshi agency, however, said it had managed jobs for 63 workers at Al Ayadi Group, another Iraqi construction company in Baghdad, in November last year.

It claimed that jobs for the remaining workers had also been arranged at the Baghdad-based company but they had refused to leave the camp and join the new job.

“The new employer and our embassy officials have gone to the workers' camp in Najaf several times and urged them to join the new company. But the attempts had been futile,” ABM Badrul Amin, managing director of Career Overseas Consultants Ltd, told The Daily Star.

The agency declined to bring the workers back home. "We are still trying to convince

the workers to join the new company in Baghdad," Amin said.

Contacted, officials at the Bangladesh embassy in Baghdad corroborated the agency's claim. 

Asked about the workers' refusal to join the new job offered by the agency, engineer Siddique expressed his reluctance to stay in Iraq any more. “I am fed up with the agency here. I just want to go back home,” he said.

As the workers' ordeal continued without any immediate solution, they wrote a letter to the Bangladesh embassy in Iraq on December 31 last year to resolve their problem by sending a team from Dhaka Iraq.

“We are requesting you [Ambassador] to send a team from Dhaka to resolve our problem. The decision whether to stay in or leave Iraq should be solved through individual worker's choice,” read the letter signed by engineer Siddique on behalf of the workers.

Maj Gen Rezanur Rahman Khan, Bangladesh ambassador to Iraq, said he had received the letter and forwarded it to the expatriates' welfare and overseas employment ministry on January 1 this year.

“We have tried to resolve the issue by arranging jobs for the workers. But they didn't agree and demanded a team from Dhaka visit them here,” he told The Daily Star over the phone on January 19.

The ministry however has yet to take any decision about sending a team to Najaf, said Kazi Abul Kalam, deputy secretary (employment wing) of the expatriates' welfare ministry.

The authorities of the recruiting agency and the officials at the embassy alleged that Rights Jessore, an NGO working with migrant workers' rights, had been provoking the workers not to join the new company.

 “Our foremost priority was to ensure jobs for all and we did it for them despite facing an unexpected delay. But the chief of the NGO is deliberately standing in the way of a smooth solution of the matter,” said Amin.

Binoy Krishna Mallick, the chief of Rights Jessore, however, denied the allegation.

“The recruiting agency in Dhaka and the Bangladesh embassy officials in Iraq are violating the workers' rights over the last eight months in the name of providing them with jobs. They are not interested in resolving the issue,” he told The Daily Star.

Over 20,000 Bangladeshis are now working in Iraq. Currently, the strife-torn Middle Eastern country is not issuing any manpower clearance to hire workers from Bangladesh, according to the embassy officials.