By Tanzim Anwar
DHAKA, April 15, 2020 (BSS) – Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen today said the Middle Eastern countries so far gave Dhaka no information about massive job cuts as the COVID-19 hit hard their job markets for foreign workers including Bangladeshis.
“We don’t know exactly where the situation will stand . . . no Middle Eastern country, however, has informed us yet that they are going for any major job cut,” he told BSS as approached for comments on the Bangladeshi migrant workers fate in the oil-rich region.
Momen added his office would try everything possible to prevent any major setback involving “our migrant workers”.
The minister, however, said few Middle Eastern countries in the past two weeks urged Dhaka to take back “our undocumented workers including jail inmates”.
Bangladesh, he said, was ready to receive its nationals in principle but Dhaka informed the concerned ME countries that “we would take them back in phases for quarantine preparedness” and “facilities are being developed for their accommodation in proper manner”.
Momen’s comments came as the first batch of 366 Bangladeshi expatriate workers arrived home last night from Saudi Arabia by a special Saudi Airlines flight at the kingdom’s cost.
Officials familiar with the process said around 200 of them were in the Saudi prisons, 132 were stranded while performing Umrah pilgrims and rests were undocumented workers.
Momen said the countries agreed to send back the undocumented Bangladeshi workers at their own cost, arranging special flights while some 350 of them were to return from Kuwait and 440 others from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the first phase.
The minister said Oman, Lebanon and Qatar as well wanted to deport undocumented Bangladeshi workers in view of the global pandemic.
“Whatever their number is on return everyone will undergo a medical checkup at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport (HSIA) and then be sent to 14-day institutional quarantine under Armed Forces Division (AFD) arrangements,” he said.
Momen said the AFD was currently working to create facilities for institutional quarantining of over 5,000 people and after readying them “we will be able to safely send 3000-4000 persons to quarantine every week”. The minister earlier yesterday chaired the third inter-ministerial meeting over the repatriation issue when it was decided that the government would provide loans up to Taka five to seven lakhs to jobless expatriate workers on their return home.
According to the decisions, every returnee will receive Taka 5000 on arrival at the airport while the family of expatriate workers who died of coronavirus get Taka 300,000.
Expatriate welfare and overseas employment minister M Imran Ahmed, state minister for foreign affairs Md Shahriar Alam, AFD’s principal staff officer, secretaries to relevant ministries and other concerned officials were present at the meeting.
Earlier on April 5, at the first such inter-ministerial meeting the foreign minister, however, said some four to five Middle Eastern countries have informed Dhaka that the coronavirus rendered many Bangladeshi workers jobless.
He said those countries urged Bangladesh to take back its nationals as they are currently under processes of decongestion in their respective countries. According to official estimates the number of documented and undocumented Bangladeshi workforce in ME countries could be over 4 million or 40 lakh mostly engaged in infrastructure developments in six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
The GCC is a grouping of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman while reports suggest their anti-COVID-19 measures hurt key sectors with significant job losses.
The pandemic prompted UAE to pass a resolution limiting percentage of an employer’s workforce that can physically continue to work from the employer’s premises to 30 percent, exempting companies related to food industry and health sector.
None of the Middle Eastern countries, however, issued any specific order to squeeze the figure of their foreign labour forces and several of them including Saudi Arabia and Qatar announced financial packages for the quarantined workers.
“(But) the intensifying economic effects of COVID-19 on the world of work could see nearly 200 million job losses in the next three months alone,” the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said in a statement two days ago.
The UN labour agency said their “latest dire assessment” found the full or partial lockdowns in countries across the globe to have affected almost 2.7 billion workers – four in five of the world’s workforce.
“Concerns are also growing for around two billion people who work informally, most of them in emerging and developing countries,” the ILO said.