Only 458 Bangladeshis find jobs in Korea as job market flounders
Saturday, 30 January 2010
FE Report
Only 458 Bangladeshis found manufacturing jobs in South Korea last year as its industrial activities slowed to a crawl hammered by the global recession, officials at the state recruiter said Monday.
This compares with 1787 workers in 2008. The Bangladesh Overseas Employment Services Limited (BOESL) said the outlook was grim as companies in the industrial dynamo of Asia stopped hiring fresh workers from Bangladesh.
"Now the Korean government has suspended fresh recruitment. Political transition there may be another reason," a senior BOESL official told the FE.
But he is hopeful that Korea might restart the recruitment process sometime in March, although "everything is contingent upon how faster its recession-battered economy picks up."
BOESL, the official agency responsible for looking after employment abroad, said so far 2,245 Bangladeshis managed to secure jobs in Korea since Seoul offered a new legal path to Bangladeshi migrants in June 2007 under its flagship Employment Permit System or EPS programme.
Korea tapped Bangladesh along with 14 other nations for its EPS programme as it preferred the government channel for recruitment of foreign workers.
The programme was designed to clean up the mess in the recruitment process of foreign workers, while also protecting their rights.
The EPS helped abolish the decades-long industrial trainee programme in 2006, under which South Korea brought in thousands of factory probationers from over a dozen Asian nations.
Another BOESL official said the EPS programme enabled Bangladeshis, especially the poor, to go to Korea with jobs "at lower costs."
"It's a better way to deploy workers. You spend less, but get higher wages," he added.
Bangladesh's over 90 per cent migrant workers are concentrated in Asia, according to the UN Development Programme, with the majority serving in the oil-rich Gulf nations.
In the Gulf, semi-skilled and unskilled workers get lower salaries and are least protected.
The Korean job market fared badly, so did the country's overseas employment last year, with the jobs almost halved to 475,000 after peaking at 875,000 in 2008, due mainly to the negative impact of global economic crisis.
By contrast, the annual flow of migrants' remittances grew by 19.39 per cent, registering a record high of $10.7 billion in 2009.
The BOESEL said it selected 7935 applicants based on their performance in the Korean language test and of them, more than 1900 have already found manufacturing jobs in South Korea.
Until the global economic crisis, the fourth largest economy of Asia was growing robustly and was a major magnet for foreign workers, especially from China, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Including workers without permits, an estimated 15,000 Bangladeshis are living in South Korea, who sent home nearly $ 17 million in the last fiscal year, according to the central bank data.
Only 458 Bangladeshis found manufacturing jobs in South Korea last year as its industrial activities slowed to a crawl hammered by the global recession, officials at the state recruiter said Monday.
This compares with 1787 workers in 2008. The Bangladesh Overseas Employment Services Limited (BOESL) said the outlook was grim as companies in the industrial dynamo of Asia stopped hiring fresh workers from Bangladesh.
"Now the Korean government has suspended fresh recruitment. Political transition there may be another reason," a senior BOESL official told the FE.
But he is hopeful that Korea might restart the recruitment process sometime in March, although "everything is contingent upon how faster its recession-battered economy picks up."
BOESL, the official agency responsible for looking after employment abroad, said so far 2,245 Bangladeshis managed to secure jobs in Korea since Seoul offered a new legal path to Bangladeshi migrants in June 2007 under its flagship Employment Permit System or EPS programme.
Korea tapped Bangladesh along with 14 other nations for its EPS programme as it preferred the government channel for recruitment of foreign workers.
The programme was designed to clean up the mess in the recruitment process of foreign workers, while also protecting their rights.
The EPS helped abolish the decades-long industrial trainee programme in 2006, under which South Korea brought in thousands of factory probationers from over a dozen Asian nations.
Another BOESL official said the EPS programme enabled Bangladeshis, especially the poor, to go to Korea with jobs "at lower costs."
"It's a better way to deploy workers. You spend less, but get higher wages," he added.
Bangladesh's over 90 per cent migrant workers are concentrated in Asia, according to the UN Development Programme, with the majority serving in the oil-rich Gulf nations.
In the Gulf, semi-skilled and unskilled workers get lower salaries and are least protected.
The Korean job market fared badly, so did the country's overseas employment last year, with the jobs almost halved to 475,000 after peaking at 875,000 in 2008, due mainly to the negative impact of global economic crisis.
By contrast, the annual flow of migrants' remittances grew by 19.39 per cent, registering a record high of $10.7 billion in 2009.
The BOESEL said it selected 7935 applicants based on their performance in the Korean language test and of them, more than 1900 have already found manufacturing jobs in South Korea.
Until the global economic crisis, the fourth largest economy of Asia was growing robustly and was a major magnet for foreign workers, especially from China, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Including workers without permits, an estimated 15,000 Bangladeshis are living in South Korea, who sent home nearly $ 17 million in the last fiscal year, according to the central bank data.