Malaysian minister assures labour market reopening

The visiting Malaysian human resources minister M Kula Segaran on Sunday had a bilateral meeting with Expatriates Welfare and Overseas Employment minister Imran Ahmad at the Probashi Kalyan Bhaban and assured of resuming recruitments of workers from Bangladesh soon.

The recruitment system and dates would be finalised at a Joint Working Group meeting between Bangladesh and Malaysian to be held on February 26.

Reopening Malaysian labour market to Bangladeshi workers was the main agenda of the bilateral meeting, said officials in Dhaka.

During the meeting, the Malaysian human resources minister said that his country would recruit domestic workers from Bangladesh.

‘We want to take workers from Bangladesh. I came to Bangladesh for this reason,’ he said.

M Kula Segaran informed that few lakh Bangladeshis were working in Malaysia and demand of workers was only increasing day by day.

‘We want to recruit domestic workers too from Bangladesh and hope that very soon it will be finalised,’ said M Kula.

Speaking about the meeting, Imran Ahmad described it as a ‘fruitful discussion’ with the Malaysian minister.

 ‘We reached an agreement that this market needs to be reopened soon,’ he added.

He said that Malaysia would recruit domestic workers this year and the Joint Working Group meeting would finalise the issues. 

Since September 2018, Malaysia remained closed to Bangladeshi workers.

Officials in Dhaka and Kuala Lumpur said that the Malaysian government was keen to reach a ‘zero-cost recruitment’ agreement for migrant workers from Bangladesh.

Recently, Malaysia and Nepal signed an agreement on recruitment of workers and this model of recruitment could be replicated here, the official said.

The Joint Working Group meeting was deferred for several times during September and November last year, mainly because of disagreement expressed by Malaysian officials, said officials in Dhaka.

In early January, Malaysian human resources minister M Kula Segaran indicated that Malaysia was aiming to reach a ‘zero-cost recruitment’ agreement for migrant workers from Bangladesh as part of the efforts to avoid risks of US trade sanctions.

Kula Segaran said that terms of the new agreement, now in the final stages of bilateral discussions with Bangladesh ‘will be similar’ to an agreement signed with Nepal, according to report published by Malaysiakini, an online newspaper.

The Government to Government Plus system, worked out by the two countries in 2016, collapsed due to the wrongdoings of the members belonging to a syndicate.

For the G2G system introduced in 2013, the cost of migration was set at Tk 40,000, but the syndicate increased it to Tk 4 lakh per worker.

Over 10.50 lakh workers have so far migrated to find work in Malaysia.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net