FE Report

The country's manpower export to North African oil rich country 'Libya' was gaining significant hike for the last couple of months, followed by mounting complaints of harassment and exploitation due to poor government control.

About 35 Bangladeshi workers, who returned home empty handed last week, described terrifying tales of physical and mental exploitations by Bangladeshi groups of middlemen, connected to Libyan employers.

They arrived with one-way exit passes issued by the Bangladesh mission in Libya, a reliable source in Zia International Airport told the FE.

"These exit-passes were issued to them as they had no passport or valid visa for leaving the country," the source added.

Talking to the FE, Muhammad Rafiq Ali, a Bangladeshi worker returning from Tripoli, said there are thousands of others like him trapped in the custody of middlemen and desperately looking for a chance to escape.

He said there are great job opportunities in Libyan companies, particularly in the construction sector. But this employment market is largely manipulated by middlemen who control duration of employment and wage-structure.

"They are mostly Bangladeshi nationals, who are involved in such acts of exploitation of Bangladeshi workers," Rafiq said calling them (the Bangladeshi middlemen) their greatest enemy there.

Making arrangements with Libyan employers, these groups of Bangladeshi middlemen issue "telex-visa' and seize workers' passports on their arrival in Libya. They were then forced to work as bonded-labourers, he added.

"We are forced to work as long as they want and don't have the right to know how much we are being actually paid by the employer," Mukaddes Ali, another worker returning from Libya, said.

"They take a percentage from our hard earned wage and we don't even know how much that is," he added.

"The worst scenario is we have to pay them more than one hundred thousand taka getting back our own passports if we wish to return home," Ali complained adding that desperate workers try to escape from their captive situation and eventually become illegal immigrants.

The Bangladesh mission there is helpless against this powerful group of middlemen, he added.

Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) data show that a total of 17,370 Bangladeshi workers found jobs in Libya during the last ten months of the year while the figure in 2008 was recorded at 5,000.

In October 2009, a total of 2,437 Bangladeshi workers were given immigration clearance from the BMET.

The current situation in Libya reminds one of the situation of Malaysia where middlemen illegally manipulated job market taking advantage of poor government control, Shameem Ahmed Chowdhury, joint secretary general of Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA), told the FE in his reaction.

"Involvement of middlemen and poor government control were the main reasons for our present misery in Malaysia," he said adding that the country's major foreign exchange generating manpower exporting sector is heading towards a similar doom in Libya as well.

He said now it is the responsibility of Bangladesh government to formulate a policy for permanent solution and assured cooperation from BAIRA whenever needed.