THE Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment has issued an alert for Italy-bound Bangladeshi workers not to make any deal with middlemen to go there under the seasonal and non-seasonal programme contract. Recently, the Italian government announced recruitment of seasonal and non-seasonal workers from Bangladesh. On 12 October this year, it issued Flussi Decree (flow decree), and Bangladesh was included in the list of the approved countries. So, Bangladeshi workers will have the opportunity to work in Italy, according to a press release.
In this context, various brokers, middlemen and agents have become active to allure Bangladeshis interested in going to Italy under the Flussi Decree. The Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment issued the warning so that the interested workers do not make any financial transaction with brokers to get recruited in Italy. According to the Ministry of Information, employers/ recruiters in Italy will apply for a no-objection letter to the local DC office (Prefettura) – using their respective SPID emails – mentioning the name and passport number of the person they want to hire.
If a no-objection letter is issued considering the income and other factors of the employer, he will send it to the candidate in Bangladesh. The candidate will apply for a visa at the Italian embassy with the letter. After arrival in Italy with the visa, the candidate will go to the DC office with the employer and will sign the employment contract.
It remains to be seen how effective this scheme will be to stop middlemen from profiteering. Most of our semi-skilled workers are not literate or intellectually savvy enough to directly apply to Italian firms so that they can be hired. So the complex process — as it will seem to many of our nationals, will be a bonanza for middlemen who could easily seek profits by arranging contacts with Italian firms who will have no idea about whom to hire.
The entire scheme seems like a plan for our middlemen to make yet more money on the backs of our poor workers who will have no idea about how to apply for the visas in the first place. A scheme which was more friendly to our citizens who have no idea about how to search for jobs on the net would have stood a better chance of reducing the strains on the workers.
