Bangladesh:::Govt to speed up worker migration to Malaysia

The government will sit with Malaysian authorities on June 24 in Kuala Lumpur to find ways to speed up the recruitment of Bangladeshi workers to the Southeast Asian nation.
Bangladesh is currently sending its people to Malaysia under a government to government (G2G) arrangement following a memorandum of understanding signed between the two countries in November 2012.


Although the initiative has brought down migration costs significantly, the migration flow is not satisfactory.
“Definitely, the G2G is a new system of recruitment of the migrant workers and migration flow might be somewhat stymied. But we have decided to speed up the flow this year after the discussion with Malaysia,” Khandker Mosharraf Hossain, minister for expatriates' welfare and overseas employment, said yesterday.

Hossain spoke with a group of reporters who cover migration and manpower, at a meeting in his ministry.
Only 4,000 Bangladeshis have so far migrated to Malaysia for plantation jobs under the G2G process between April 2013 and May 2014 against the ministry's target of sending 10,000, said officials of Bangladesh High Commission in Kuala Lumpur.

The migration flow might have increased in many numbers, but the government is strict to thwart any kind of irregularity in the recruitment process, Hossain said.
The government does not want to open any window for recruiting agencies and middlemen to weasel in to exploit migrant jobseekers, he said.

Meanwhile, Malaysian Home Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi yesterday warned that employers must pick up foreign workers under their care within 24 hours from the latter's arrival at that country's entry points.
Foreign workers who are unattended to by their employers within the stipulated period would be deported at the cost of the employers, he told local reporters.

Employers who fail to abide by this rule, which will take effect immediately, will be blacklisted by the Immigration Department and will not be allowed to hire another foreign worker to replace the one they had left behind, Ahmad Zahid added.
source:::sSs