Women migrant workers send home maximum amount of their earnings even though their income is lower than that of male migrant workers, power-point presentation showed at a consultation.
It also revealed that women migrant workers send home 90 per cent of their earnings, but they face different types of exploitation at home and workplaces abroad.
WARBE Development Foundation (WARBE DF) organised the virtual multi-stakeholder consultation on 'Protecting the Vulnerable Women Migrants and Domestic Workers' Human Rights during the COVID-19 Pandemic' on Thursday marking International Human Rights Day.
Government officials, and rights activists, among others, took part in the programme.
They said women workers are contributing a lot to the country's economy. But still they are deprived of due rights at home and job destination countries.
Referring to a report, the power-point presentation showed that a total of 131 dead bodies of women workers were brought home from Saudi Arabia during the period between January 2015 and October 2019.
Of them, 98 women committed suicide and five were murdered in the employing country, said the report sent by Bangladesh embassy in Saudi Arabia to Dhaka in 2019.
It also said the definition of domestic work is not clear in the contract papers of Bangladeshi women migrant workers in Saudi Arabia. For this reason, it creates a misunderstanding between workers and employers about their area of duty.
The embassy report also mentioned that about 42 women workers were tortured there. Of them, one woman was the victim of gang-rape.
Participants at the consultation noted that the women workers are now more vulnerable than any time in the past because of the coronavirus pandemic. They are at the risk of losing jobs and unpaid work.
Some of them also cannot return home though their job contracts are over. Even they are not getting proper health services from workplaces, they said. Jasiya Khatoon, director of WARBE-DF, moderated the programme where parliamentarian Hosneara Lutfa Dalia, and Syed Saiful Haque, chairman of WARBEDF, were present.
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