Preying on poor migrant workers: Fix the fixers

C R Abrar

Photo: Star

Bangladesh's labour migration sector is today faced with a number of challenges. These include a loss of traditional markets, limited success in securing new markets, high migration costs and the dominance of intermediaries both at the sending and receiving ends.

There is a general acknowledgement both by the government as well as the private recruitment industry that among the South Asians Bangladeshis bear the highest cost to secure short-term overseas employment in the Gulf States and South-east Asian countries. There are two major factors contributing to this phenomenon; the pervasive practice of visa trading in the countries of destination and the inability of aspirant migrants to directly procure recruitment agency services.

Over the years, labour market conditions for overseas employment have been greatly skewed in favour of the receiving countries. Even until the mid-1980s, work permits from the employers or recruiters were secured without charge. The recruiters also paid for the air ticket and other travel related expenses of the workers. In addition, the Bangladeshi recruiting agencies received commission for each worker they placed as a facilitation fee. Under these conditions, limited costs were incurred by migrant workers while processing their migration and the wages they received were much higher than what they get now. Thus migration, though short-term, became a gainful experience from the very beginning of their deployment for most of the workers.

Now these conditions have almost fully reversed. In most cases, the workers are not provided with air-tickets or other expenses and Bangladeshi agents, both formal and informal, have to secure work permits from employers and recruiters of labour receiving countries by paying hefty sums. These costs are then passed on to the workers., The wages of migrant workers have also sharply dropped in all Gulf States, particularly those in the low skilled category.

All these conditions have led to a situation in which migrant workers are forced to pay at least three times the officially stipulated amount of Tk 84,000 to finance their migration. It will take a worker on a monthly average wage of 300 riyals to work for an uninterrupted period of more than three years to simply recoup the money invested to finance their migration.

Visa trading is an illegal practice in all Gulf States. The national laws of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and other states in the region do not condone employers charging fees for recruiting workers. However, in some of these states to discourage dependence on foreign workers, governments impose a levy on companies that bring in workers from overseas. As per such law, it is the employer who is to bear the cost, and not the worker nor his or her agent. Visa trading has become a reality in short-term migration, soaring up the migration cost and making short-term migration near untenable. Despite being an illegal act with far reaching adverse consequences, this issue has remained un-recognised by Bangladesh's policy makers. Unfortunately, this issue has not been adequately pursued in either bilateral discussions with labour receiving countries or in multilateral forums such as the Global Forum on Migration and Development or the Colombo Process. Perhaps, our negotiators act on the assumption that labour receiving countries may not be at ease to face the hard truth of the involvement of their nationals in this illegal act. This dissuades our negotiators and political leadership to take up the issue with their counterparts of the Gulf states.

Although workers of all South Asian countries are subjected to visa 'premiums', it is those in Bangladesh who pay the most. Industry sources inform that the current rate of a visa for unskilled Bangladeshi workers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) stands at US$2000. This high charge can be attributed to the unhealthy competition among the Bangladeshi recruiting agencies. These agencies instead of demanding payment for their services to foreign employers or recruiters, bid against one another to secure work permits, when the latter come on visits to Bangladesh with job offers. This cannibalistic approach by the recruiting agencies in dealing with foreign clients has caused immeasurable harm to the industry and led to a disproportionate rise in migration costs in Bangladesh.

On several occasions senior leadership of the sole federating body of agencies, Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA), publicly decried such unprofessional conduct by most of its members, it is yet to offer a solution to the problem. Good examples are not difficult and far to find. Their Nepalese counterparts have come to an agreement among themselves that none would offer more than US$500 as visa premium to foreign recruiters. Foreign employers thus have no option but to recruit workers from Nepal at that rate.

The presence of tiers of dalals (sub-agents or informal intermediaries) between aspirant migrant workers and recruiting agencies is another shady area in the labour recruitment process. Empirical studies conducted by the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU) have found that although informal intermediaries work in direct connivance and even sponsorship of the formal recruiting agencies, the latter has the uncanny tendency to conveniently and squarely shift the onus of wrongdoings on to the dalals. When workers face problems, the registered agents deny conducting any transactions with the workers. As financial transactions are in most cases conducted through the dalals, the government's mandated agency, the Bureau of Manpower and Training (BMET), finds it difficult to hold the registered recruiting agencies responsible. All these form a vicious cycle of opaqueness and unaccountability under which aspirant workers lack direct access to recruiting agents and therefore depend on informal intermediaries. The informal intermediaries act as a conduit of information or on many occasions, mis-information and money between the registered agents and the workers. This scenario demands the immediate attention of the policy makers.

RMMRU studies have also found that in many instances aspirant migrants or members of their families prefer using dalals to process their migration. Dalals reside in their own districts and they feel it is both convenient and comfortable to deal with a local. Also, if things go wrong the migrants can exercise some leverage on the dalals through other members of the community to secure redress. It is also a fact that dalals dealing with migrants at the grassroots, in most cases, do not have access to registered recruiting agents and themselves are dependent on other metropolitan-based dalals.

Given the ground reality where all parties are dependent on the informal intermediaries, the latter has become a significant stakeholder in the migration industry. Therefore, it is imperative that a clearly thought out policy strategy be devised that recognises the role of dalals and their relationships with the registered recruiting agents on the one hand and the dalals and aspirant migrants on the other.

In order to curb malpractice of recruiting agents and dalals in sending workers the government set up a database in which aspirant migrants were to register their names. The plan was to ensure that all recruitments were carried out using the database. Despite the existence of the database for a number of years now, very few workers have actually benefitted from the registration process. There is no doubt that recruitment from the database could be the best possible solution to the problems that plague the industry, if such a process can be implemented. But so far no attempt has been made to examine why the system has remained dormant. Could it be that the system is not grounded in reality and is a wishful scheme, particularly in the context of a corrupt visa-trading regime that has come into force? Or, could one assume that the system has been kept deliberately dysfunctional to suit a nexus of vested interests of private recruiting agencies and public officials.

So long as the workers are not being recruited from the database, contingency plans must be made to rein in the recruiters and their intermediaries. Bringing the intermediaries under a legal cover is essential.

There are three possible options in this regard. Firstly, BMET could be given the task of issuing licenses or monitoring the performance of the dalals. However, it may not be practical for the under-resourced BMET to monitor the thousands of sub-agents. BMET's performance in dealing with 800-plus registered recruiting agencies is much to be improved upon, so adding further responsibility is likely to be an exercise in futility. The second option is to encourage and provide incentives to recruiting agencies to open branch offices in the district towns so that migrants can access their services and directly establish contact to secure information and process their cases. This option also appears to be less feasible as at the end of the day, the decision to open branches solely rests on the entities concerned. If they do not see direct benefit for themselves in decentralizing their presence, they are unlikely to do so. That leaves us with the third option of making it mandatory for the recruiting agents to acknowledge their respective sub-agents, issue them with photo identity cards and provide a list of the sub-agents to the BMET. The BMET in turn would post a comprehensive list of sub-agents of all recruiting agencies to the local government bodies.

This arrangement would bring the sub-agents under a legal cover while also making the private recruiting agencies accountable for the actions of the informal intermediaries whom they rely on. The arrangement would also grant the government necessary authority to take actions against the agencies whose formally appointed intermediaries are found to be engaged in any malpractice.

If implemented in due spirit, such a system would be the first step in plugging a major gap in the recruitment system. It would help bring about transparency and accountability in the recruitment industry. It will at least to an extent weaken the propensity of the registered agencies to shrug off any responsibility of the many misfortunes that migrants face and their tendency to blame the victims. It would also take away the standard excuse of the government functionaries that they cannot provide redress as the deals were done with unauthorized agents.

There are a number of problems that the labour recruitment industry is faced with in Bangladesh. Though successive governments have taken several initiatives to streamline the labour recruitment sector, the issues of visa trading and bringing dalals under legal cover have been left unattended. The absence of a proper and bold policy initiative in this regard is having a severe debilitating impact on the lifeline of our national economy. They are also undermining the migration efforts of hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting workers and pushing them and their families further into the abyss of poverty, which they wished to escape in the first place.

It is hoped that as the Chair of the Colombo Process Countries, Bangladesh will lead other labour sending countries in demanding concrete actions against the practice of visa trading and remind the Gulf states that their employers and recruiters are widely engaged in this dubious exercise that is forbidden under their own national laws. The leaders of the Gulf states should be impressed upon in no uncertain terms that preying in on poor and marginalised migrant workers tantamount to be 'haram' in Islamic faith that they so zealously safeguard.

C R Abrar teaches International Relations and coordinates the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), University of Dhaka.