Drishtipat Blog

Migrant Workers: Narratives of Destination, Denial & Class
NEW AGE, September 8, 2008

There is very little that the government doesn’t know about how the sector is run and there is very little that the powers that be have done in the past for the poor workers because they are the ones who are running the show. To reform the sector would mean going against the best interest of the ruling class, writes Afsan Chowdhury

NOTHING describes better the nature of our state than the fact that while we crow over the high dollar reserve generated by our guest workers, we obstinately refuse to do anything serious about the conditions of the people working in great difficulties and pain while sending money home.
It is strange that the three economic sectors that keep Bangladesh afloat have seen high levels of economic distress as far as the workers are concerned. The narrative of the garments sector is well known and for the last three decades it has made many rich and turned the workers into a drill machine working for unacceptable wages and benefits. The obligation to innovate lies largely with the owners who seem to have singularly failed to take the sector forward beyond sweatshop status and investment in workers is negligent because they are many and replaceable.

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For a governing class which cannot bring itself to care the least little bit about migrant workers’ welfare, the latest round of crowing about remittance volumes is nothing short of disgusting.

Bangladeshis abroad boost economy by 7.9 bln dollars: officials

DHAKA (AFP) — Overseas Bangladeshis have pumped a record 7.9 billion dollars back into their home economy in the past financial year, thanks to an increase in expatriate workers, officials said on Monday. The amount, to the year ended June 30, 2008, grew by two billion dollars on the previous year, pushing the foreign exchange reserve to a comfortable six billion dollars, central bank governor Salehuddin Ahmed said.

“We’ve received a record 7.939 billion dollars remittance in the outgoing fiscal year, which is up by more than 33 percent on the previous fiscal year,” Bangladesh Bank general manager Nabagopal Bhowmik told AFP. “It’s the biggest increase we have ever seen since our people started going abroad with jobs. If the trend continues, we will receive around 10 billion dollars of remittance in the 2008-09 fiscal year,” he said.

Great news, right? Now if only the people in power could be persuaded to read articles like this, and then try to do something about the numerous abuses listed therein.

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“I’ve already run out of food, water and money: if nobody comes for our rescue, we’ll not survive in the depot as we don’t have money to buy food”–Words of Bangladeshi migrant worker stuck in a camp near KL International Airport in Malaysia, thanks to Shika Trade International, a Bangladeshi manpower agency.

Odd-job worker Ishak Salleh and his family have been staying in a canvas tent since their rented houses were demolished by a relative last Wednesday. They have received assistance in the form of food supply and cash aid from the Seberang Prai Utara district office and the Penang zakat management centre. Ishak was “touched by the amount of aid he received.”– New Straits Times. [Crossposted from Imperfect World]

Around 90,000 Bangladeshi migrant workers live and work in Bahrain, 10 per cent of the total population of that country. In the year 2006-07, these migrants sent $80 million in remittances home. But the recent murder of a Bahraini man by a Bangladeshi worker has sparked angry reactions from government officials and politicians. The Bahrain government has put an embargo on recruitment of any further ‘unskilled’ workers from Bangladesh. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Malaysia had already put restrictions on Bangladeshi labourers, sparked by earlier incidents. As often highlighted at conferences and seminars, foreign remittance is the second highest foreign currency earner for Bangladesh. But apathy from our embassies, corrupt middlemen, flawed immigration policies, lack of a robust government response and disparities in labour laws have placed hard-working men and women in international news headlines for the wrong reasons. Read The Report

From an email from M Haque

Living here for long, like many others without having a hope or aspiration to be naturalized as Saudi, but having a secured job, majority of us hoped for a continuation until the contract ends. But this hope has started shattering, rather a bizarre situation started to prevail very recently. Fear and frustration engulfed all of us. Millions of Bangladeshis living in Saudi Arabia passing days in a complete uncertainties. We do not know when and how we may have to abort our stay and return home completely unaware and unprepared.

Many in Riyadh, whose shops, specially the metal scrap shops were sealed off by the police, having hundred of thousands riyal worth of goods inside. Many in fear, closed their shops and went home with a longer re-entry visa.
Those who had to go, as they were picked up from the streets completely unwarranted, leaving behind their years hard earned capital and profits and now passing days and nights in agony whether they can return. If at all can return will they be able to gain control of their assets.

The majority who works in medium size organizations or establishments living with a growing fear, if they are sent back all on a sudden as the news spreads, what they are going to do back home. If they are picked up on the street and bundled in the prison van, their bank account or belongings back in the accommodation will be lost. It is perceived that, since there is no official confirmation, in Makkah alone 20 thousand people have been hoarded in the prison including families with children.

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Bangladeshi migrants are sending Billions in remittance back home. Everywhere in the world, we are “foreigners” who service for the adopted country and also home country. But back in Bangladesh, are “foreigners” welcome?

1. Mostafa Minhaz of Malibag Chowdhuripara, a PhD research fellow by profession, filed a writ petition (represented by Adv Ruhul Amin) challenging the ambassadorial appointment of Debapriya Bhattacharhya. In the petition, he claims as per Public Service regulation 3, subsection 1 and 4, no person married to a foreign national, or engaged to a foreign national, can work in the diplomatic corp. Debapriya’s wife Irina Bhattacharya is a Russian national. The court has given gov’t 8 weeks to show why appointment is not illegal. [Aamokal, 14/12/07]

2. The Board of Investment (BoI) has decided not to allow any foreign national to work in Bangladesh for over five years in order to encourage transferring technical know-how to local people. (more…)

I’m sure most readers of UV are already familiar with the events of the last few days involving expatriate Bangladeshi workers. A small recap:

15th September AFP:

Malaysian immigration authorities have established a makeshift camp in the car park of Kuala Lumpur’s airport for foreign workers waiting to be collected by their agents, a report said Sunday.

Immigration Department chief Wahid Don said that corralling the workers in the car park prevented them loitering in the main airport buildings and creating an “unpleasant” situation for other travellers.

“We can’t have them running around the airport and congesting the premises,” he told the Sunday Star newspaper.”

(Frankly I personally don’t like the “chief’s” tone, but am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps his sympathy isn’t best conveyed in print.)
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Bricklane, Bangla TV channels and the whole community are abuzz by the latest scandal to rock the Londoni Bangladeshi community. Unlike other times, this one is homegrown and we don’t have any Monica Ali or Salman Rushdie to blame. But over the last two years coupled with TV channel called Channel S, their unlimited access to the Bangladeshi power base during the last government, Dr. Fazal Mahmood, the managing director of both Channel S and First Solutions, and his cohorts shamelessly used the pitch “trust us because we are from the community”. Along with using the local pitch they also used Islam to get the trust of people in the community. They took an office in the London Muslim Centre. They filled up channel S with Jamat sympathizers, they (the same business group) had regular programs in TV asking for unregulated contribution to Islamic charities. In the end, as it transpired they just played shamelessly and irresponsibly with the hard earned money of the blue collar workers. On Friday night, when callers where calling the Bangla TV channel in a live show talking about how they got scammed, it was painfully depressing for the viewers. One person re mortgaged his house and sent 70 thousand pound only to see it disappear. One person’s money sent for his mother’s treatment did not make it to Sylhet. Now why are people so angry at them?

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A few interesting developments on the labour front. On the positive side,

Bangladesh government finally is being proactive about the pitiful condition of our migrant workers in the middle east. In that regard, a MOU has been struck to ensure better working condition for the workers in the UAE.

Here is the detail.

Can we see similar initiatives in Saudi Arabia as well? If you are not aware of what’s going on in the Saudis, take a read here. The findings are horrific.

To cite only a few examples, we interviewed migrant workers from Bangladesh who were forced to work ten to twelve hours a day, and sometimes throughout the night without overtime pay, repairing underground water pipes for the municipality of Tabuk. They were not paid salaries for the first two months and had to borrow money from compatriots to purchase food. An Indian migrant said that he was was paid $133 a month for working an average of sixteen hours daily in Ha’il. A migrant from the Philippines said that he worked sixteen to eighteen hours a day at a restaurant in Hofuf, leaving him so exhausted that, he told us, he “felt mentally retarded.” The employer of a migrant from Bangladesh, who worked as a butcher in Dammam, forced him to leave the kingdom with six months of his salary unpaid.

The answer lies, not in having more committees. But on the acknowledgement from the kingdom about these abuses and taking proactive steps in addressing them as recemmended here

This brings in the question of what we, the average citizens, can do about this? The issue of the migrant workers has been unaddressed for a long time. Documentaries have been made, HRW reports have been published but nothing much has changed.

We, at Drishtipat, have been thinking about whether we can do a project surrounding this and would like to get your input on how we can add the most value to the process. Several ideas have been discussed. Among them:

1. Handing out a book at the airport making them aware of their rights and offering them key contact numbers at the country they are going to.
2. Offering to make final calls to their would be employers and confirm that the workers are not stranded at the foreign airports (which is by the way quite a common case)
3. Highlighing issues of abuse and working with the arab media for awareness and lobbying with the governments to take more pro-active stand on these issues.
4. Highlight proactive, resourceful embassies and name and shame the ones that do not do their job in helping to protect our citizens.

You can help here in two ways for now.

A. By offering us suggestions on the above.
B. By doing some google research and posting as a comment links for any relevent articles or cases of abuse you can find in the net. Look at newspapers like Gulf Times and Arabnews as well.

Previously, Dr. Abdul Momen sent us some pictures and stories which we highlighted here.

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From the pages of NYT — A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves. Not Bangladesh-specific per se, but no less relevant to the emigration issues of our country. Quite long and beautifully written.

About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state — migration nation — it would rank as the world’s third-largest. While some migrants go abroad with Ph.D.’s, most travel as Emmet did, with modest skills but fearsome motivation. The risks migrants face are widely known, including the risk of death, but the amounts they secure for their families have just recently come into view. Migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world’s foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums — “remittances” — bring Morocco more money than tourism does. They bring Sri Lanka more money than tea does.

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[admin: we are going to republish old articles time to time that deserves more attention than the political diatribes that we see here often. Here is one:]

From Bikrampur to Tokyo
When I was but a young boy of 12, a long time ago now, my cousin Shobuj bhaiya left Bangladesh for Japan, in search of work. This was sometime in the late 1980s, when a sudden wave of opportunities in Japan, Korea, Singapore & Malaysia lured many young men from our villages and small towns to those strange lands. These young men saved, borrowed, sold off assets and property to put together the fees that the adom-bepari would charge. In Shobuj bhaiya’s case, he planted potatoes in the black soil of Bikrampur for several years before he’d finally saved up enough. If memory serves, the amount charged by the bepari even then was in excess of 1 lakh takas. But off he went and before long, his younger brother Maroof followed him to Japan.

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Some 41 workers, who were discriminated and terminated by their Malaysian employer, received around Tk 10 million as compensation after a protracted legal fight. Those of you who have seen My Migrant Soul and saw the plight of the workers in Malaysia, will be able to relate to what a great legal victory this is. Again, where the government is supposed to stand up for the migrant workers’ rights, it is doing nada. It is the NGOs like Shishuk and Tanaganita which are coming forward to work on cases like this. UK’s migrant workers alone contributed almost 300 million pound to Bangladesh economy in 2003. Add the contributions of the middle east workers and you will see how these people are the biggest contributors to foreign exchange reserve that our finance minister is so proud about. Yet, he is not willing to do anything about their horrific plight. Recently, sickened by all these a few of these workers in Jordan attacked the Bangladeshi consulate. We can only imagine what made them do it. We, at drishtipat, always tried to highlight this issue by film screening and portal sites. However, we have been unable to come up with any project. For some reason, among the educated migrants to North America and Europe, this issue does not appeal that greatly.

Admit it, when you saw the lack of English skills and nervous migrant workers at the Dhaka airport, you were annoyed. You were bothered that they are taking too much time at the queue. When they sat next to you,
at Emirates or Gulf Air, you were upset at their lack of ettiquette. But none of us cared to think a bit deeper about the moving story of journey that each of them brought with them.

If you have a spare moment, read this piece by Afsan bhai called “Are Mishkins people too”. It will make you think twice the next time you see these people in the airport.

For many survival is impossible in Bangladesh and thus we have the expatriate crowd. But they are not the non-resident Bangladeshis of the USA and other developed countries including a few in the Middle East who often write to The Daily Star. They are mostly the desperate poor who populate the lowest end of the job market anywhere in the world. They are a new category of people, “The Miskins”. They will not stay back but send their money home and often can’t even read our paper.

Neglected by the national authorities, hounded by the police of their countries of work, they are the most despised and denigrated lot anywhere who provide the valuable foreign exchange with which we make foreign trips as VIPs.

For them making a trip abroad is part of the survival strategy, learnt over centuries. They have no option to make some decent money except to leave home and return. They are not Chand Sawdagar but his boat assistant who never gets mentioned in myths.

Unless you have seen them where they work you won’t know to what depth of indignity they are made to descend into to make money to send home.

“I ran for few miles across the jungle to escape capture by the police. Finally, I reached Kuala Lumpur after three months. I had spent one lakh to reach there. I found work in construction site carrying bricks a few months after I landed. It’s black market work. But police raided the site and I was arrested. After three months in jail I was let go and deported. I went with a lakh and came home empty.”

This was Malaysia from where lakhs of working Bangladeshis are going to be forced out because the Bangladeshi officials didn’t bother to cover the interest of these ordinary Bangladeshis. They are going to be thrown into jails and then shipped home. Media will pick up a few sob stories and then the episode will be over. Hopes generated will be crushed and some hopes will never flower. Even as I write I feel the silliness of my language, the inadequacy of words to express what it means to have no future and no multiple visas to a western country.

Another good but long read is the recent HRW report

“After 48 hours of work at a stretch, the authorities used to give us two pieces of bread. We were bound to work without salaries. As we demanded our salaries, they beat up us mercilessly”, he said, adding, “We informed the Bangladesh Embassy in Jordan of the matter but to no effect”.

Thursday, 05 May 2005. BDNEWS via Daily Star reports,

Owners of a garments factory in Jordan are allegedly ill-treating more than a hundred Bangladeshi workers, giving them inadequate food, water, and accommodation and depriving them of due wages.

Kabir Hossain, a worker of Al Shaded Garments, who was recently sent back home, narrated the tale of inhuman torture in a press conference at the Bangladesh Crime Reporters’ Association office yesterday.

“After 48 hours of work at a stretch, the authorities used to give us two pieces of bread. We were bound to work without salaries. As we demanded our salaries, they beat up us mercilessly,” he said, adding, “We informed the Bangladesh Embassy in Jordan of the matter but to no effect.

Kabir said 121 Bangladeshi workers went to Jordan through ‘Golden View’, a Bangladeshi travel agency, in November-December last year.

“The 121 workers had to huddle in four small rooms and the Al Shahed authorities used to give us inadequate food and water. They put us under lock and key in our rooms and factory so that we could not contact with others,” he added.

“As I, along with five other workers, protested the inhuman torture, the authorities forcibly sent us back,” he said.
Kabir alleged that Ohiduzzaman Razu, owner of Golden View ignored them when they informed him of the matter after returning home.

He demanded compensation from the travel agency and urged the government to take action in this regard.

What and exactly what makes labour all different from slavery? If this goes on, and our men in Jordan live on ‘two pieces of bread’ and our women go sexual slaves in Saudi Arabia, are we supposed to seat all mum?

Whatever ministry and whichever embassy is in charge, stop exporting slaves and try fighting for the due rights of ‘these wage earners’. Please!

— Tasneem Khalil, Dhaka