Recruitment by March deadline uncertain

Recruitment of 200 additional factory inspectors by the March deadline looks uncertain as the government is yet to finalise necessary procedure including formulation of recruitment rules. Although the proposed recruitment rules got the approval of the public administration ministry on Thursday, the rules have to go through a long process before being finalised, labour ministry officials said.
They said the rules had been sent to the public administration ministry on February 4.

Appointment of 200 additional inspectors for the garment sector by March was one of the key requirements of the Bangladesh Action Plan for restoring generalised system of preferences facilities in the US market. The recruitment rules would now be sent to the committee of secretaries and then to the Public Service Commission for their approval, labour secretary Mikail Shipar told New Age on Sunday.

He said, ‘Once the rules get the approval of the committee of secretaries and the PSC, we can say that we have made a significant progress in this connection.’
‘I hope that the proposed recruitment rules would be placed before a meeting of the committee of secretaries this week and we have been trying to complete the process quickly,’ the labour secretary said. After getting approval of the committee of secretaries and the PSC the law ministry will scrutinise the rules and then the proposed recruitment rules would be sent to the president for final approval, labour ministry officials said.

Appointment of the inspectors is also a key requirement of Sustainability Compact, a platform of the Bangladesh government and the European Union, formed on July 8 last year in Geneva. Recently, foreign diplomats from the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany and the EU pressed for meeting the requirement by the end of March. On February 13, at a meeting with foreign, commerce and labour secretaries, the five foreign diplomats said that the US would review the GSP status in May while Bangladesh would have to submit its progress report by mid-April.
The diplomats also said people across the globe wanted to know about the improvements Bangladesh had made in terms of safety and working conditions in the garment sector ahead of the anniversary of the Rana Plaza building collapse that killed more than 1,100 people, mostly garment workers.

Md Faizur Rahman, joint secretary (labour), told New Age that they would provide all the necessary documents to the public administration ministry on Monday to send the proposed recruitment rules to the committee of secretaries.

The procedure for recruiting 200 additional factory inspectors is being formulated and the government is trying to  complete the recruitment by the March deadline, he said. ‘After finalising the recruitment rules we will have to decide on whether the recruitment will be done by the labour ministry or the PSC,’ Faizur said adding that the recruitment process would not take time as there was a direction of the government to recruit the inspectors from the BCS candidates who passed all three tiers of the test but could not be given cadre posts.

On February 13, commerce minister Tofail Ahmed told reporters that he had already talked to the PSC chairman about the issue. Earlier, prime minister Sheikh Hasina directed the officials concerned to see if the factory inspectors could be appointed through Bangladesh Civil Service tests. BCS candidates contest for the first class jobs in the country’s civil service and a large number of candidates come out successful in all tests, but only a few win cadre posts due to limited number of posts.

Mikail Shipar said that the condition was to appoint 200 inspectors, but the government had decided to appoint 288 inspectors. He said sixty-five of the inspectors would be non-cadre class I officials while the rest of them would be class II of. (Source: The New Age, 04/ 03/ 2014)