A delegation of Malaysian officials will come to Dhaka next week to sign a deal to recruit 1.5 million workers in the next three years, says the overseas employment minister.
The agreement will allow private recruiting agencies to send workers directly to the Southeast Asian country.
Malaysian Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi at a meeting last month in Kuala Lumpur with Bangladesh’s former overseas employment minister Khandker Mosharraf Hossain had confirmed the recruitment through private agencies. The ministry then said 500,000 low-skilled Bangladeshi workers would be recruited this year under the new business-to-business (B2B) recruitment agreement.
New Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment Minister Nurul Islam BSc on Tuesday told bdnews24.com: “They (Malaysian team) are coming on Aug 9.”
“We’ll discuss the solutions to the problems Bangladeshi workers are facing in Malaysia. “We’ll also discuss how to ensure the new workers’ salaries, insurances and low migration cost,” he said. The minister said the matter of legalising the undocumented workers in Malaysia would also be on the agenda. Ministry officials said Malaysia would take workers through B2B process from those who are in the database of 1.4 million. They were supposed to be sent under the government-to-government (G2G) mechanism.
Every worker would be initially recruited for three years and would get one-year extension after that. Malaysia is one of the biggest labour markets of Bangladesh. Around 600,000 Bangladeshis are currently working in one of Southeast Asia’s wealthier economies. After a long break, the country in 2013 resumed import of workforce from Bangladesh for its plantation sector under the G2G agreement. But Bangladeshis did not show much interest in working in the plantation sector. The government had set a target to send 50,000 workers every six months at the time, but managed to send only 7,000 in past two years, according to the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET).
Later, the government started considering inclusion of the private recruiters by reforming the G2G process.
