Bangladesh and Malaysia Discuss Deal to Protect Migrant Workers

A new deal for Bangladeshi migrants moving to Malaysia may see recruitment fees waived – which officials say could considerably help curb human trafficking, debt bondage and abuse.

Malaysia, home to 4.8 million migrant workers and heavily reliant on foreigners for jobs rejected by locals, is considering a zero-cost recruitment agreement with Bangladesh, whose migrant workers were banned in September 2018 after concerns that they were charged extreme fees.

“There should be no instance of trafficking under the garb of labor migration,” says Ahmed Munirus Saleheen, senior official at Bangladesh’s Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment, to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “We feel that any effort to bring down the cost of migration … will contribute to the prevention of human trafficking.”

The deal aims to banish Bangladesh’s current informal recruitment system which involves unofficial middlemen, who bring recruiters and workers together, but charge excessively high fees and often give false promises about jobs. With the informal system, workers end up either in debt bondage, or even working illegally and getting jailed.