Straight Talk
Back on the chain gang
IT started innocuously enough with the first reports trickling in from Kuwait last week. Thousands of Bangladeshi workers had gone on strike and taken to the streets, demonstrating for their rights.
What did they want? The usual. To be paid the amount they had contracted for. To be treated as human beings. To be accommodated in half-way decent conditions. The nation shrugged and turned the page. After all, hadn't we heard the same old story many times over the years?
It wasn't until the first workers began to be deported that we sat up and began to take notice. But seeing the hundreds of returnees, bruised, battered, bandaged, telling tales and bearing physical evidence of shocking abuse has at long last, it seems, pricked our collective conscience.
After all, we already know, somewhere in the recesses of our minds, how dire things are for our migrant workers. We know that every year some quarter of a million of our fellow countrymen and women join the untold numbers already trying to eke out a living overseas. We know that they are the lowest of the low, doing the most menial and degrading of jobs. We know that they are routinely cheated, mistreated, abused, beaten, raped.
But we turn a blind eye. We prefer to focus on the doings of our better-educated migrants. The college graduates, the doctors, lawyers, and engineers. When we think of non-resident Bangladeshis, we think of these smart professionals, and hold conferences to discuss how we can leverage their expertise and skills in helping to develop the country.
We look towards India and Pakistan as models of how to integrate our educated and high-earning compatriots and how to attract their investment dollars and give them a seat at the policy table. Now many are returning home and making their presence felt.
But what of our migrant workers? There are over 200,000 Bangladeshis in Kuwait. Hundreds of thousands more in Saudi Arabia and UAE and scattered throughout the Middle East. Similar numbers in Malaysia and Singapore. US, UK, Spain, Italy -- there is no place that Bangladeshis don't end up.
Many people here in Dhaka have worked hard to focus attention on the plight of our migrant workers. They have written about them, made documentaries about them, conducted research, and held round-table discussions and seminars and conferences.
But it has never been enough. All this attention has apparently never been sufficient to incline any government we have ever had to do much to protect the interests of our migrant workers. Of course, we are perfectly happy to cash the cheques. Remittance earnings are on pace for $10 billion this fiscal year. We know that the economy would grind to a halt without our migrant workers. For this, they get lip service.
What will it take before we put the rights and security of now literally millions of our fellow countrymen and women at the head of our policy agenda? Maybe the national humiliation that we have suffered in Kuwait will finally incline us to treat the issue with the gravity that it merits.
Let's call a spade a spade. The entire manpower industry is a testimony to our failure. Every year one million Bangladeshis are added to the job market. The country does not have jobs for them and so as many as one in four are shipped abroad, and we do not inquire too closely into their circumstances as long as the foreign currency continues to flow in return.
Think about this dynamic for a moment. How abject and shameful a dereliction of duty this is. Ultimately our goal must be to eliminate the manpower trade in full. No self-respecting country can countenance its men and women being used as beasts of burden, to do the work that other countries feel is beneath the dignity of their own people. But this seems like a bridge too far for our policy-makers. As population pressure rises and the economy continues to be unable to create sufficient employment for the ever-expanding pool of job-seekers, we are happy to continue to ship our excess labour overseas.
No one can blame the migrants. They know full well how tough it is. Everyone has heard the horror stories, everyone knows of people being cheated and abused and returning home poorer than when they left. But they go anyway, chancing their lives on the faint hope that they will be one of the lucky ones. After all, what options do they have here?
As long as the manpower trade remains the backbone of the economy and an outlet for millions of otherwise unemployed young men (mostly) and woman, we will not be rid of this pernicious business. But the very least we can do is to protect our migrants.
I wonder what it would take for the Ministry of Expatriate's Welfare and Overseas Employment to actually live up to its name. One would have thought that millions of Bangladeshis remitting billions of dollars annually would have been sufficient.
Then there is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which conducts our external relations with the countries where our workers are treated like animals. Perhaps we are scared that if we take a stand that the host countries will no longer wish to take Bangladeshi migrant workers. But is this kind of cringing, race to the bottom approach really the best we can do? Look at the Philippines and how they protect their migrant labour work-force. If the human dimension of the problem leaves you unmoved, consider how much money could be remitted if our workers were not routinely cheated of their contracted salaries. $10 billion a year could easily be $15 billion or even $20 billion.
The problem originates with the manpower agencies who make money off the immiseration of their compatriots. No government has ever taken affirmative steps to rein in the abuses that are rife in the industry, perhaps because the ranks of our parliament and even the cabinet were filled with manpower traders whose financial clout and political influence ensures that the trade stays beyond the purview of meaningful regulation.
All this must change. The trade needs to be brought under strict regulation and scrutiny and those who make their money by exploiting their fellow countrymen and women need to be brought to book. Our embassies abroad and the expatriate welfare ministry need to make migrant workers their number one priority.
Last week the bad news was from Kuwait. Not many months ago it was Bahrain. Before that it was Malaysia. Yesterday it was the Maldives.
How can we look at ourselves in the mirror when we run this country by selling our people into what amounts to indentured servitude. We owe it to the country, to our fellow countrymen and women who toil as migrant workers, and to ourselves to protect each and every Bangladeshi, inside the country and out.
The fact that we depend for our national well-being on supplying cheap labour to be used and abused by the rest of the world and our failure to protect the basic human rights and dignity of these migrant workers shames us all.
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