Despite low wages, female workers are increasingly migrating to Middle East countries with a dream of a better future.
The trend of female workers going overseas is very high this year because some new markets such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Jordan are being explored, said Begum Shamsun Nahar, director general of Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET).
BMET gives a 21-day training to the intended female workers going for housekeeping, she told The Daily Star yesterday.
Nahar, however, said female workers are supposed to go abroad at employers’ costs, but private recruiting agencies are charging fees from them.
“We have inspected some recruiting agencies and found that they take money from the workers unlawfully,” the BMET boss said.
A total of 46,230 Bangladeshi women went abroad for jobs till October this year, up by nearly 24 percent from the same period a year ago, according to BMET.
The number is 13.50 percent of the total workers — 342,219 — who went to foreign countries till October.
Some 30,579 female workers went abroad in 2011 and 37,304 in 2012 out of the total 568,062 and 607,798 respectively.
The United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and war-torn Lebanon are the main markets.
These workers, mostly housekeepers, earn on an average Tk 10,000-Tk 16,000 ($120-$200) a month and those who go for work in garment factories receive up to $400, according to Nahar.
Parents experience hassles dealing with their household chores and children in the Middle East countries and the people in Singapore and Hong Kong are busy with their careers, and hiring a live-in caregiver or a domestic maid is a solution.
As the Filipino and Indonesian housemaids leave the Middle East countries due to low wages, there is a growing need for female workers to meet the gap in those markets.
However, the women going abroad for housekeeping allegedly face emotional and physical abuse, poor working conditions, low pay and discrimination. Often, some of them are forced to return to their countries failing to cope with the situation.
“Employers do not pay for their (workers) return. We bring them back at our costs,” the BMET director general said.
The BMET has no exact data on how many female workers are deported each year, but it said 18,389 workers, both male and female, were sent back home from different countries only in 2012.
Source: The Daily Star
