Manpower agents must clean up their act
Photo: Zahedul I Khan
I am shocked to read that Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA) is threatening to stop manpower export because the government has decided to arrange manpower export to Malaysia. Ali Haider Chowdhury, general secretary of the Association, has claimed that government officers are too inexperienced to pick workers or arrange proper training for them. Is he suggesting that officials who have passed stringent civil service examinations and qualified to hold jobs in the government do not compare with some of the so-called recruiting agents that treat people seeking job abroad as migrant workers heartlessly? They even lure them into selling what little property they own to pay hefty fees to obtain poor-paying jobs under disgraceful conditions. I have personal experience about these agencies. I had to travel to Dubai and to Kuala Lumpur to rescue people I knew who were in the clutches of these agencies. In Kuala Lumpur , one person, who had been sequestered in the airport for a week and was later given an inferior job and wanted to return home, was unable to do anything because these agencies kept those workers' passports in their control. I travelled to Malaysia and it was only with the intervention of the Bangladesh High Commission that I was able to get the man out of what amounted to indentured labour. Even then the broker did not permit me to see him and put him on another flight home purely out of spite. Two lakh taka was wasted on this misadventure. It is these vile practices that our government is trying to put an end to, and the Association should put more effort in cleaning up its own act than to protest the wise decision of the governments of Malaysia and Bangladesh.
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