Japan firm to hire 10,000 workers

Tsukamoto, a Japanese company, will recruit Bangladeshi workers for its construction, care-giving and nursing concerns, a senior official said.
He said authorities of the two countries will sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) sometime in May.
A delegation from Tsukamoto visited Bangladesh to discuss recruitment process, said secretary of the ministry of expatriates' welfare and overseas employment (EWOE) Khandakar Iftekhar Haidar.
He said the company will send proposal on workers' demand, salary structure and other details to the Bangladesh embassy shortly.
The employer will recruit nearly 10,000 Bangladeshi workers for its different sectors like construction, care-giving and nursing, he added.
"We got the assurance from the company that it will employ Bangladeshis in its priority categories," the secretary said.
Mr Haidar also said Bangladesh has a database of skilled workers. The workers will be selected from the database. And the employers will also arrange training for the selected candidates on Japanese language and other necessary matters.
Under the training programme, Japan will send a master trainer. The master trainer will train Bangladeshi teachers and they will train the workers.
"The number of demand for Bangladeshi workers from Japan will gradually increase as it needs thousands of foreign workers," the EWOE secretary added.
Japan needs about 75,000 foreign workers within the next five years, after the gradual rise in the number of elderly people, rehabilitation programme for tsunami-affected areas and hosting Olympics and Paralympics in 2020.
The world's third-largest economy used to recruit workers from mostly China, but China is now discouraging manpower export due to increase in local demand for the same. Chinese workers also claim higher wages.
Japan is looking for alternative markets for manpower hiring. It is very much willing to recruit workers from Bangladesh.  
Bangladesh is working to diversify its overseas employment markets from the Middle-East and Southeast Asia, where job opportunities are shrinking and wages are low.
The government is trying to tap a significant share of the employment opportunity in Japan, officials said.
The ministry has taken up a work-plan, which includes amending the existing guideline of sending technical interns to Japan.
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