AFTER the government to government (G2G) system failed to live up to the Bangladeshi migrant workers’ Expectation, Malaysia under a new mechanism has agreed to recruit 500,000 workers from Bangladesh in the next six months, the Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment Ministry on Wednesday said. The agreement, called Business-to-Business (B2B) mechanism, was reached at a high level bilateral meeting in the Malaysian capital as per the reports. Earlier G2G recruitment drive was able to send only 7,000 workers to Malaysia as against reported listing of 14 lakh aspirants for job in Malaysia. The government miserably failed because of bureaucratic handling, in addition to involvement of the ruling party men in the process who started exploiting them to make easy money.
The renewed recruitment process would be carried out through private recruiting agencies of the two countries under the new agreement. According to new disclosures the Malaysian Home Minister has said his country would welcome legal workers from Bangladesh. Now application for employment would be received online and to be monitored by concerned Malaysian government agencies. Workers will be recruited for a three-year term with provisions of extension of work permit by another year. A Malaysian delegation will come on a visit to Dhaka soon to work out the detail of the B2B recruitment system. Technical Committees of both the governments would later examine the modality of recruitment.
It appears the Malaysian government’s move is a timely initiative in the backdrop of desperate attempts by thousands of Bangladeshi job aspirants to Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur is very much aware of their tragic end in the hand of human traffickers as many of them died in Thai jungles and Andaman Sea. But question arises as to whether the private recruitment agencies would handle the job aspirants humanely without betraying through the process. Earlier they were removed from recruitment process for financial cheating and sending recruits to Malaysia without valid job offer and immigration clearance. Consequently, they turned out to be illegal migrants and victim of police arrest and deportation, very often risking Bangladesh’s good relation with Kuala Lumpur. Dhaka don’t want to see the repeat of the episode and therefore enough care must be given to this aspect while promoting the recruitment again.
People would also like to see that Malaysian employers would handle the new migrants with dignity without exploiting them by way of poor payment. They would get all safety cover. So everyone expects that a correct and highly reliable recruitment system would be put in place in the first place. Bangladeshi workers are hard working and law abiding – we should at least ensure that they would get protected job opportunities to help their poor families in need.
