The National Citizen Party (NCP) has welcomed the prospect of reopening Malaysia’s labour market for Bangladeshi workers after a closure of more than two years, but expressed concern over the selection of 25 recruiting agencies to send workers to the country.
The party said no new syndicate should be allowed to emerge, considering past experiences of irregularities and excessive recruitment costs in Malaysia’s labour migration sector.
NCP spokesperson and head of its International Relations and Diaspora sub-committee Asif Mahmud Shojib Bhuyain raised the concerns in a statement issued on Saturday.
The statement said Malaysia’s Foreign Worker Centralised Management System (FWCMS) had published a list of 25 Bangladeshi recruiting agencies eligible to process workers’ recruitment. However, the basis and criteria used to select the agencies remained unclear, it said.
The NCP said the Bangladesh government had earlier sent Malaysia a list of 423 recruiting agencies that met the conditions set by Kuala Lumpur.
It said the government needed to clarify the process through which only 25 agencies were selected from that list and the criteria behind the decision.
The party said widespread allegations of irregularities and excessive charges had emerged in the past over sending Bangladeshi workers to Malaysia through syndicates.
It alleged that workers were charged up to around Tk5.5 lakh, despite the government-fixed migration cost of Tk79,000.
As a result, many aspiring migrant workers were forced to sell land, exhaust their savings or take loans, leaving them burdened with heavy debt in their attempt to go abroad.
“Reopening the Malaysian labour market is a major opportunity for Bangladeshi workers seeking employment abroad. We do not want a new syndicate to emerge after dismantling the previous one,” Asif Mahmud said.
He said the government must ensure that the hard-earned money of Bangladeshi workers, who often sell land or borrow money to go abroad, does not end up in the pockets of syndicates.
The NCP also called for an investigation into allegations that recruiting agencies were selected and syndicates were formed based on political influence and proximity to those in power during the previous Awami League government.
It demanded legal action against individuals and organisations involved in irregularities and excessive charges, while ensuring that the same groups could not return under new names or structures.
The party also urged the government to prioritise resolving the issue of workers who completed all procedures in 2024 but were unable to travel to Malaysia.
The NCP called for the Bangladesh-Malaysia Joint Working Group to finalise and publicly disclose details regarding the number of workers to be recruited, recruitment procedures, migration costs and other conditions in a transparent manner.
The party said Malaysia’s labour market should not become the exclusive domain of a handful of agencies.
It stressed the need to ensure fair opportunities for all eligible and licensed recruiting agencies, affordable migration costs for workers and transparency and accountability throughout the recruitment process.
