Visas for the Hong Kong-bound female migrant workers have reached Bangladesh authorities and they will be sent onward this month.
“We have received a total of 40 visas for the female migrant workers and more visas will come soon,” Director General Begum Shamsun Nahar (DG) of Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) told Dhaka Tribune at her offices Tuesday.
SA Trading, a private recruiting agency, is sending workers for the job of housekeeping. Earlier, the government provided training to 200 female jobseekers on housekeeping English and Cantonese languages, for two months.
“We are trying to send the female migrant workers within this month. So we are contacting Cathy Pacific Airlines for their travel,” Abdul Alim, owner of SA Trading, told Dhaka Tribune over the phone.
Officials say a female worker will get a monthly wage Tk40, 400 ($505) while they will be provided with food, accommodation and medical facilities. The workers have to pay Tk20, 000 to the private recruiting agency as service charge to go to Hong Kong.
Apart from that, each worker will have to pay an amount of about Tk112, 000 ($1,400) from their wages, through five monthly instalments to cover the costs of training, Hong Kong-based recruiting agent Kevin Wong told Dhaka Tribune recently. This amount will not be required now, he added.
Officials say Hong Kong needs about 100,000 housekeepers in the next five years. The country wants to recruit Bangladeshi nationals too, said officials at the BMET.
The BMET signed agreements with the private recruiting agencies of Hong Kong to send female migrant workers there. Following the agreement, the government had created an online database of female job aspirants across the country. The qualified workers would be picked from the database. According to the BMET, around 40,000 female jobseekers have registered their names from across the country.
“The number of female registration is very low. But if necessary we will conduct further registration of names,” the BMET DG added.
