Bangladeshis suffer big blow as Gulf job market shrinks

TEACHERS DEMAND WAGE HIKE: Teachers lay down on the street as police attempt to stop them during a protest in Dhaka yesterday. Police obstructed teachers as they attempted to march to the education directorate to demand their inclusion in the government’s monthly payment order which will increase their wages.

IANS/Dhaka

Bangladesh suffered a crucial blow in the second half of last year as employment opportunities for the country’s millions of foreign job aspirants in some oil-rich Gulf states including the United Arab Emirates (UAE) came to a near halt, officials and industry insiders said.

“Some 232,961 Bangladeshis found overseas jobs in the second half of last year when the Gulf states, including the UAE which in the recent years hosted two-thirds of total employment, recruited a very negligible number of workers from the country,” a senior official of the Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) said.

Overseas jobs for Bangladeshis in the second half of 2012 fell by nearly 23% compared with that in the same period a year earlier, the BMET data showed.

Of the total overseas employment in the first half of 2012, the BMET official said more than two-thirds of Bangladeshi workers found jobs in some Middle-Eastern countries including the UAE.

The official who preferred to be unnamed said: “Some 374,837 Bangladeshis in January-June period of 2012 found overseas jobs, a rise of nearly 50% over the same period last year.”

According to the official, overseas employment for Bangladeshis continued to slide as the UAE has temporarily stopped issuing all kinds of entry permits for Bangladeshi passport holders since the middle of last year reportedly citing Dhaka’s failure to resolve its security concerns over identification and fake documents.

The UAE, which now hosts nearly 1mn Bangladeshi workers, the second highest number after Saudi Arabia, has been a sustained labour market for the last couple of years despite the global economic recession.

Propelled by impressive employment growth in UAE market, remittance-reliant Bangladesh witnessed big boom in overseas employment in 2011 after two dull years against the backdrop of world economic recession.

Overseas jobs for Bangladeshis fell by nearly 18% to 390,000 in 2010 compared to that in the same period a year ago. Earlier in 2009 Bangladesh also suffered a big blow when the BMET data showed only about 475,278 Bangladeshis found overseas jobs against a record of 875,000 in 2008.

Job market improved in 2011 when 568,062 Bangladeshi people found overseas employment.

But the boom faded by December 2012 when overseas employment plunged near 41% year on year to 32,409.

Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA), apex body of 1,200 private recruiters of overseas jobs in the country, expressed grave concern, saying Dhaka must drive to boost diplomatic relations to help their efforts to send more manpower.

BAIRA president Shahjalal Majumder said that “Bangladesh suffered the latest crucial blow as labour migration to one of the most important destinations for Bangladesh has remained stuck since August.”

“We must make our efforts to address the concerns of the UAE and keep up diplomatic efforts to persuade some other important Middle East countries including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to withdraw their restrictions on receiving manpower from Bangladesh,” he said, adding Dhaka’s serious diplomatic drive can pave the way for bolstering the traditional overseas job market for Bangladeshis.

As jobs dry up in most of the Gulf nations, he said there is no alternative to looking for new destinations.

He, however, expressed the hope that right this moment there is good prospect for Bangladeshis in Malaysia and Thailand which are set to recruit millions of workers to support their development activities.

Industry insiders say the sliding trend in overseas employment seems to have had no negative impact so far on remittances.

Inflow of remittances, one of the key sources of foreign exchange for the impoverished nation of about 153mn people, in 2012 reached $14.17bn, up about 17% year on year.