Working out innovative ways for enhancing manpower export stressed
By Asghar Ali Mubarak

ISLAMABAD—The Ministry of Labour & Manpower must improve its performance especially with regard to manpower export, which is presently far below its actual potential observes the Senate Standing Committee on Labour & Manpower, which met at the Parliament House Thursday with Senator Naeem Hussain Chattha in the Chair.
It directed the Ministry to redouble its efforts regarding export of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labours and workers from Pakistan and to examine each and every request received from abroad minutely and do the necessary homework before signing the MOU / agreement to avoid trouble afterwards.
The Senate Body specifically called for materializing the demand for workers received from South Korea and other countries by processing them in a fair, transparent and objective manner. The Ministry should examine each and every request threadbare and should also take input from our Embassies and Missions abroad besides having knowledge of local Labour Laws. “Bring everything in black & white and don’t work on assumptions”, it directed. The Ministry must make sure that at least everyone found medically fit (out of the candidates applied for the job) and having completed the Korean language course should go there, it instructed.
The Senate Committee also took exception to some highly misleading advertisements placed in the newspapers lately by some Overseas Employment Promoters and instructed the Ministry to make sure that no such advertisements regarding immigration could appear in the Press except with the prior permission of the Director General of Protectors of Immigrants and routed through the Overseas Employment Corporation (OEC). Senator Enver Baig, a Member of the Committee, specifically pointed out that some unscrupulous Overseas Employment Promoters are doing this in Karachi without permission from relevant quarters. He said that according to the law, the advertiser must posses valid Overseas Employment Promoters license and those who are doing it illegally must be punished under Section 17 of the Emigration Ordinance 1979. “These firms often collect millions of rupees under the so-called ‘processing fee’ and then disappear mysteriously, thus defrauding the gullible public”, which later has to run from pillar to post for redressal. The OEC must monitor the activities of these firms and to take action prompt against the wrong doers before they could harm the general public, he maintained.
The meeting called upon the Ministry and OEC to devise innovative strategies for manpower export and to utilize the Pak Missions abroad as well as the services of CWAs and Labour Officers posted there for this purpose. The Community Welfare Attaché’s must not sit idle, they should rather have proper liaison with the relevant Government organizations in their host countries as well as with their respective Chambers of Commerce. It directed that the suggestions forwarded by the honourable Senators and Members of the Committee must be given due consideration and every effort must be made to rectify the old wrongs.
Earlier, the Minister for Labour & Manpower briefed the Committee on the steps being taken by the Government to enhance export of Pak workers abroad.