Employment agencies ask for relief from ten-fold license increase

The Myanmar Overseas Employment Agencies Federation (MOEAF) will submit a letter to the Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population to reconsider the plan to increase the deposit paid by agencies to the government from Ks5 million to Ks50 million, as employment agencies have expressed much displeasure for the ten-fold increase.
“The recruitment agencies could not pay the current rate by the government because our business is not so good currently. We have submitted a request to the Union Minister and the President’s Office to reconsider the rate,” said U Win Htun, Vice president-2 of MOEAF.
The government’s current deposit from the recruitment agencies is Ks5 million before issuing a business license. ge increase is ten times more than the previous deposit rate.
“We will report to the Union Attorney’s Office, which has known legal issues concerning the plan of the increased rate,” the federation said.
About 150 agencies have submitted request letters to the government, the federation said.
“The government should take action of withdrawing licenses if agencies breach the disciplines while sending out labour overseas. They should solve the problem in different ways without increasing the license rate,” said U Kyaw Htin Kyaw, general secretary of MOEAF.
The Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population said the reason for the increased rate is to weed out fake recruitment agencies, to mitigate illegal workers and to reimburse from the collected cash those labourers overseas sent by agencies if they face some extenuating circumstances.
“Our main aim is to protect the workers. Overseas employment business is not a trade. It involves human beings. We want to restrain the agencies from committing labour violations,” U Myo Aung, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population told The Myanmar Times.
U Myo Aung also said that there had been too many cases in which agency owners swindled would-be migrant workers and then fled, leaving the government to sort out the mess at the taxpayers’ expense
According to the MOEAF, there are 247 registered agencies in Myanmar, an increasing number as the demand for overseas employment rises.