Dhaka should call on Kuala Lumpur to dismantle the labour recruitment syndicate that has created havoc for hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi workers in Malaysia.

The demand was made by migrant workers, rights activists, and recruiting agents, as Chief Adviser Prof Muhammad Yunus will hold a bilateral meeting with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim today in Dhaka.

They said 100,000 to 200,000 Bangladeshi workers remain jobless or underpaid in Malaysia because of systematic irregularities by vested quarters who were close to power structures in both countries.

A study by US-based non-profit Verite, published in May, said 96 percent of Bangladeshi migrants in Malaysia reported facing risks of exploitation resulting from recruitment debt.

The debt makes it extremely difficult for them to leave an exploitative employment situation, or to seek remedy from local authorities.

Khairul Alam (not real name) is one such Bangladeshi who went to Malaysia in October last year, spending Tk 5 lakh. He was contracted for a job at a construction company with a monthly wage of RM 1,500, which could be doubled with overtime and other allowances.

However, he, along with several hundred others, was neither provided jobs nor paid.

He then filed a case with the Labour Department that eventually asked his hiring company to arrange a job transfer to a suitable company.

"I am yet to get any job. I have been bringing money from home for my survival. My family back in Bangladesh is in debt," Khairul told The Daily Star yesterday.

An estimated 800,000 Bangladeshis now live in Malaysia. Of them, about 450,000 migrated between August 2022 and May this year under a syndicate of 101 recruiting agencies.

All their recruitment documents were processed by a web-based system named Foreign Workers Centralised Management System (FWCMS).

"FWCMS is used for the manipulation. Unless this system is replaced, the syndicate cannot be broken," a diplomatic source in Malaysia told this correspondent.

Policymakers in Malaysia too want the syndicate to be dismantled because labour exploitation has already brought a bad name for Malaysia, he said.

As per the MoU between Bangladesh and Malaysia, the recruitment cost has been agreed to be Tk 78,990.

However, on March 28, four UN experts wrote a letter to the Bangladesh and Malaysia governments detailing labour exploitation in Malaysia. They mentioned that each migrant spent between US $4,500 and $6,000.

According to rough estimate, over US $1 billion has been laundered out of Bangladesh to Malaysia between August 2022 and May 2024.

The experts said criminal networks operate in the recruitment process and deceive the workers into paying exorbitant recruitment fees.

The whole process reportedly begins with bribery within Malaysia's human resources and home affairs ministries to obtain "fake quotas for bogus employers."

"Subsequently, bribery extends to Bangladeshi High Commission in Malaysia and Bangladeshi syndicated agents to facilitate recruitment approval," the letter said.

In response, Bangladesh's mission to the UN in Geneva on May 29 said Dhaka wanted to allow all its 1,520 licensed recruitment agencies to send workers to Malaysia, but Kuala Lumpur selected only 101 agents.

Meanwhile, members of Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (Baira) held a press conference in the capital yesterday, urging the leaders of the two countries to dismantle the recruiting syndicate and bring the culprits to book.

"If the syndicate is dismantled, recruitment costs can be reduced to Tk 1.5 lakh. This will also ensure migrants' welfare, prevent money laundering, and increase remittance," Baira Joint Secretary Fakhrul Islam told The Daily Star.

BRAC Migration Programme Head Shariful Islam said the Malaysian labour market has always been mired with syndication or manipulation.

In 2016-18, there was a 10-member syndicate that manipulated the market. Even, the government-to-government recruitment deal was failed because of the vested quarters, he said.

"We want Malaysia Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to take a strong stance to stop any syndication. He has always stood for migrant rights, and we want him to make it a reality," he added.