Bangladeshi agencies targeting Malta for €600-a-month jobs

Aqra bil-Malti

Bangladeshi recruitment agencies have identified Malta as an attractive country to send thousands of unskilled workers accepting to earn just €600 per month for a raft of jobs, The Shift can reveal.

Maltese companies are being inundated with e-mails and phone calls from Bangladeshi agencies, based in Dhaka, asking them for job vacancies and whether they are interested in doing business with them.

To make the offer more attractive, the same agencies are offering Maltese employers a ‘gift’ of some €1,500 one-time lump sum for every Bangladeshi they employ.

Although it is unclear who will be forking out the ‘gift’, experts in the sector told The Shift that this will probably be paid by the workers themselves, forking it out of their initial salaries once they start working in Malta.

Identity Malta sources confirmed that these recruitment agencies are making significant headway in Malta, so much so that the number of Bangladeshis issued a work permit has significantly increased in the past months.

The offers being made by the agencies are illegal under Maltese laws, as they fail to meet the statutory minimum wage, which all employees in Malta must earn. This currently stands at €925 a month.

Also, ‘gifts’ such as the €1,500 per worker being offered to Maltese employers are not in line with the law.

Still, Bangladeshis with these irregular conditions are being employed, as both Identity Malta and the Department for Employment and Industrial Relations (DIER) are not in a position to make the necessary investigations, mostly due to understaffing and expertise.

A source at Identity Malta said that these recruits are handed contracts that, on paper, show their employment is according to law. In reality, the employees earn much less than what is declared in their contracts.

In the past years, Malta has become a European hub for cheap labour in an attempt to keep average wages as low as possible.

Third-country nationals are the only available employees for unskilled posts such as deliverymen, waiters, agriculture workers, construction assistants, and many others based on the premise that Maltese nationals are not prepared to work in such conditions, which barely make ends meet.

At the same time, most of the locally available unskilled employees on the market have been put on the government payroll in many vote-buying exercises.

The island has increased its intake of third-country national workers from less than 10,000 in 2013 to over 100,000 in 2022, according to the latest available statistics.

While this has increased Malta’s economic growth, it is also the main cause of decaying infrastructure, such as electricity, water and sewage, uninterrupted traffic chaos, overdevelopment, claustrophobia and social inequalities, among other issues.

According to Eurostat figures, in 2022, Malta issued 38,000 permits to third-country nationals or 71 permits per 1,000 inhabitants, ten times higher than the EU average for the same year.