UNB, Dhaka :
Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed, now in Qatar, has proposed enactment of tougher labour laws to protect expatriate workers from forced overtime and poor living conditions in the countries under the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
He said, it is necessary to have bilateral discussions on policies of different countries over manpower exports instead of only focusing on dialogue on labour rights issues between the manpower-exporting and importing countries.
He came up with the proposal while making his deliberation on ‘Labour Markets Policy and its Impact on the Economy: Associated Challenge’ in the 14th Doha Forum in the capital of Qatar on Tuesday.
Countries belonging to the GCC are the major destinations for workers from Bangladesh and many other countries where the expatriates face many challenges while working.
Tofail also proposed introduction of more stringent laws to protect expatriate workers from arbitrary increase in house rents and simplification of work visa rules to enable an expatriate to freely change employers which will help solve the problems faced by the expatriates in the countries under the GCC.
The Commerce Minister also proposed joint initiatives with the private sector to reduce salary bias against Asian expatriates and better enforcement of labour laws to protect interests of female workers, especially unskilled and semiskilled female workers.
He suggested a joint initiative with the private sector to provide a work environment where female expatriate workers do not suffer from any work related bias, especially with reference to salary bias.
Einar Gunnarsson, Permanent Secretary of State, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Iceland, Dr Pedro Goncalves, Deputy Minister for Innovation, Investment and Competitiveness, Portugal, Daniel Daianu, Prof of Economics, School of Political and Administrative Studies, Romania and Panagiotis Mihalos, General Secretary, International Economic Relations and Development, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Greece, according to an official at the Commerce Ministry here.
Tofail said, Bangladesh has a huge workforce joining the labour market every year. “As the domestic market finds it’s difficult to absorb this huge work force, we’ve to depend on other countries for finding employment for the unemployed work force.”
He said labour markets policy in other countries are also important for Bangladesh as the country has around eight million workers (expatriates) throughout the world, the main concentration being in the Middle East.
The Commerce Minister mentioned that the world faces a huge challenge of creating productive jobs for its expanding labour force and this challenge is global in three ways.
The first two challenges are inadequate availability of productive jobs is now a worldwide phenomenon, affecting both North and South and global forces such as cross-border flows of trade, capital and labour now have important consequences for employment in individual countries, he said.
