Recruitment of 30,000 workers starts next year
Ending a four-year ban, Malaysia will initially recruit 30,000 Bangladeshi workers for its plantation sector from early next year.
“It will also recruit gradually workers in the manufacturing, construction, agriculture and service sectors. This is a milestone in the history of the country’s manpower export sector,” Expatriates Welfare and Overseas Employment Minister Khandker Mosharraf Hossain said yesterday.
He was briefing newsmen at the ministry’s conference room about signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Malaysian government.
The Southeast Asian country will appoint the workers for five years in three phases. The first two phases will last two years each, while the last phase will take a year.
Registration of the interested workers will begin this month through the website of Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET).
“After registering online, the workers will be called up at the 13 BMET Technical Training Centres across the country for verifying their applications,” noted the minister.
The workers would be selected on district quotas based on the requirements of the recruiters. If needed, the job seekers would be able to take loan from Expatriate Welfare Bank, he added.
Secretary of the ministry Zafar Ahmed Khan said an unskilled worker would get a minimum salary equivalent to Tk 25,000, while the skilled workers would get more. “The workers will have to work eight hours a day, six days a week and they will enjoy overtime facility.”
The minister warned the job seekers not to give money to any middleman or recruiting agency.
Against the backdrop of brokers’ meddling and some recruiting agencies’ irregularities in the recruitment process, Malaysia had stopped recruiting Bangladeshi workers at the end of 2008.
From now on, Bangladeshi workers will be sent to Malaysia under government-to-government arrangements. It will cost a job seeker a maximum of Tk 40,000 to land a job there, mentioned Mosharraf.
Investigations had earlier revealed that workers were charged over Tk 2 lakh each for a job in Malaysia, though the government-fixed rate was Tk 84,000. To maximise their profit, some manpower syndicates even sent additional workers, leaving them (workers) in trouble abroad.
On November 26, Mosharraf and S Subramaniam, human resources minister of Malaysia, signed the MoU on manpower recruitment at Putrajaya International Convention Centre.
The Bangladesh government held detailed talks with the Malaysian human resource minister in Dhaka in September to start sending Bangladeshi workers under state arrangements.
Source: The Daily Star
