The cash-strapped Myanmar military regime has announced fresh checks on employment agencies in a further bid to force Myanmar migrant workers to send their foreign earnings home through official channels.
The Labor Ministry said it will check on employment agencies beginning Dec. 16 to see if some 50,000 legal migrant workers have remitted their salaries through the country’s official banking channels.
The ministry said that 429 employment agencies sent 56,860 workers to Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Singapore, Korea, Japan, and some Middle Eastern countries between May and August, and that it would check the agencies to see whether those workers they had sent have remitted their salaries.
Fifty agencies a day will be checked from Dec. 16 at the ministry’s Yangon regional office.
New remittance regulations that took effect on Sept. 1 last year require migrant workers to send home at least 25 percent of their salaries monthly or every three months through the country’s banking system.
They must open a joint account in a bank regulated by the junta-controlled Central Bank of Myanmar before they leave and remit 25 percent of their earnings into that account at the official exchange rate, which is significantly lower than the market rate.
According to an official at the Myanmar Overseas Employment Agencies Federation, employment agencies must submit remittance records of at least 50 percent of the workers they sent abroad.
“If they can’t submit documents, they will be suspended,” he warned.
The manager of a Yangon-based employment agency said: “Agencies have been struggling for a long time. They like to give us trouble. There are job offers, but fewer people want to work abroad because of the remittance rules. It has become a burden and operations are slowing down.”
On Aug. 30 the regime formed a 13-member supervisory committee with officials from military intelligence to enforce the rules.
Traditionally, Myanmar migrants rely on hundi, an informal cross-border credit system of money agents, who take a small fee but convert the money at the market rate of around 4,000 kyats to the U.S. dollar.
But under the new remittance rules, workers’ earnings would be converted at the official exchange rate of around 3,000 kyats to the dollar, severely depleting their value for migrant workers’ families.
A migrant laborer working near Bangkok said: “Everyone wants to get the best rates available. If banks offered the same rates as the market rate, it would be different.”
The regime said it has already punished some 150 agencies that were unable to submit remittance records of their workers with suspension or fines. The Labor Ministry said 118 employment agencies failed to submit remittance records in November, and if they fail again, they too will be fined or suspended.
Workers who fail to remit their salaries, for their part, will be prevented from leaving Myanmar again to work overseas, which can be done by denying them overseas worker identification cards or visa renewal, the regime warned.
