Govt to study labour market prospects in Eastern Europe

The government has undertaken an initiative to conduct research on exploring employment opportunities in countries of Eastern Europe against the backdrop of traditional labour markets in Gulf countries “getting squeezed”.

According to a “request for expression of interest” of the Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment published last month, two separate researches will be conducted on labour markets in countries under Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Eastern Europe.

“As the traditional labour market is getting squeezed due to various reasons, we need to explore new and alternative overseas job markets in order to sustain our remittance inflow,” reads a terms of reference paper.

The duration of each research will be of six months and the ministry will hire on contractual basis individual consultants who are the country’s eminent researchers in the field.

Under the initiative, four more researches will be conducted on different aspects of labour migration.

An official of the ministry recently said the initiative was a part of its regular activities to sustain labour migration.

Although more than one crore Bangladeshis live in over 160 countries as per government estimates, the six GCC countries — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain — host the majority of them.

According to the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET), of those who migrated abroad between 1976 and 2019, nearly 77 per cent had migrated to the six GCC countries.

In recent years, although labour migration to Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE remained at the expected level, new employment in Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain dropped drastically.

The BMET data shows Kuwait hired only 52,135 workers from Bangladesh from January 2018 till August this year in contrast to 49,604 being employed in 2017 alone.

In 2019, Qatar hired 50,292 workers from Bangladesh. From January 2020 to August this year the number dropped to 27,106.

Bahrain hired 72,167 workers from Bangladesh in 2016 but employed only 20,278 more workers in the next five years and eight months.

With about 7.83 lakh new employment till August, Bangladesh has been seeing a surge in migration of fresh workers this year after setbacks in the past two years amidst the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic.

However, 85 per cent of this year’s new employment were in only three GCC countries — Saudi Arabia (60 per cent), Oman (15 per cent) and the UAE (10 per cent).

On the other hand, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain hosted only three per cent of Bangladeshi migrants this year. They hosted 14.5 per cent of Bangladeshi expatriates between 1976 and 2019.

On the other hand, Romania, a country in Eastern Europe, recently emerged as a new destination for labour market opportunities for Bangladesh with a handful of workers having already started to migrate there.

Nurul Islam, a former director of the BMET, said while exploring new markets, the government should focus on the possibility of sending a high number of workers.

Besides, the government needs to take an action plan to implement outcomes and recommendations generated from the research works, he said.

Also, to get the maximum output, there should be coordination between officials concerned and the individual consultants during the research period, he said, suggesting inclusion of recruiting agents in the process.

Although labour market research was conducted in the past by different international agencies and under the ministry’s arrangements, those were not considered to be of the standard expected, he further said.