Local and international human rights defenders on Wednesday fixed ten principles on the rights and dignity of migrant workers saying the recruiting agents should not charge workers any fees and all costs should be borne by the employers.
The other principles include — job contracts should be made available in migrants workers' language, recruiting agency or employer must not retain migrant workers passport, migrants workers are remunerated fairly in line with local wages and the employers facilitate safe return of migrant workers at the end of the contract with all benefits.
The principles were set on the concluding day of the two-day roundtable discussion tilted 'Bangladeshi migrant workers: responsible recruitment, responsible return', jointly organised by Refugee and Migratory Movement Research Unit and the London-based Institute for Human Right and Business at a city hotel.
Representatives from different human rights bodies, international brands, workers' organisations, migrant organisations, Bangladeshi recruiting agencies, government officials and trade unions took part in the discussion.
'A migrant worker is at the end of the chain, he or she should not have to bear the cost of recruitment,' member of the board of advisors of IHRB and former chief of Amnesty
International Irene Khan told a press briefing at the end of the roundtable.
She said manpower business is responsible not only for safe recruitment, but also for safe return. 'If people are not recruited properly, they will not return properly,' she added.
Expatriate welfare and overseas employment secretary Zafar Ahmed Khan, IHRB executive director John Morrison, representative of manpower ltd, a global manpower recruitment company David Arkless and director of RMMRU CR Abrar also spoke at the briefing.
Jafar said the government was working to make bilateral agreements with the manpower receiving countries to reduce the migration costs as well as protect the workers abroad.
He said presently the government was consulting with recruiting agencies and other stakeholders to fix the maximum migration cost. 'We will be able to declare a logical migration cost with the consent of all parties soon,' he said.
Source : New Age
