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Are Bangladeshi workers being abused by companies in Kosovo?

Are Bangladeshi workers being abused by companies in Kosovo?

An unusual request came to Kosovo from Bangladesh.

This Asian country requested that its citizens be employed in the newest state in Europe.

However, for several years, citizens from Bangladesh have been working in various private companies in the country.


But according to the president of the Private Sector Union, Jusuf Azemi, these workers are working in poor conditions.

"They are being abused extremely much, they work for a very low salary, 350-400 euros, the jobs that are becoming more difficult in Kosovo, and they are in terribly difficult conditions because I myself have visited them, it happened that in a 16-meter room there were about 11 workers stationed and they are hungry, they eat food there, they clean there and it is a great horror," says Azemi.

And the number of workers coming from Bangladesh, according to Azemi, is over 1.

"The biggest horror is that they do very hard work and even very dangerous work. Is this not productive? Most of them do not know how to communicate with company owners and in fact, these workers often cannot give what they need to give to the company owner because of the language. And we have information that about 1000 workers are of this type and I have seen cases where a company has taken Bangladeshi workers to work, and they have gone to another place to complete their salary, and after working hours the owner went and told them that these are my people and they do not dare to work anywhere else," Azemi says to tevë1.

But according to the president of the Kosovo Chamber of Commerce, Lulëzim Rafuna, Kosovo is not the final destination of these workers.

"This has not presented a permanent solution for business, because their arrival has not created the convenience for business that I believe these, this workforce will stay for a very long time. These have mostly used Kosovo as a springboard to come to Kosovo to work until finding an opportunity to join the EU," the EU states.

According to a report published by the Gap Institute, in 2023, over 3 work permits were issued by the state of Kosovo to foreign citizens during that year.