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  • Yerevan to help Armenian migrants

    YEREVAN TO HELP ARMENIAN MIGRANTS
    By Naira Melkumian in Yerevan

    Institute for War and Peace Reporting
    May 5 2005

    Hundreds of thousands of Armenians working abroad enjoy little
    protection. Now their government wants to improve conditions for them.


    Vahan joined the massed ranks of Armenia's expatriate workers because
    he wanted a decent job abroad, but in the end he was so badly treated
    in Russia that he had to come home.

    "I went because I needed to earn more money to support my mother and
    sister," said Vahan, who went to Russia six months ago but recently
    returned to his native Sevan in the north of Armenia.

    After a long search, Vahan landed a job working for a computer centre
    in Moscow. "But come my first payday, the owner told me he had no money
    to pay me," Vahan told IWPR. "Three months later he told me outright
    he wasn't going to pay me. He knew I had no local registration and
    was working illegally, so I had no legal right to press my claims."

    Gagik Yeganian, who heads the migration and refugees office of the
    Armenian government, told IWPR that migration needs to be better
    regulated so that people like Vahan can be protected. He said the
    government has made it a priority to pass a bill on labour migration
    this year.

    The new legislation will seek to address two sides of the problem:
    enabling agreements to be drawn up with employers abroad to secure
    the best possible opportunities for migrant workers; and secondly
    to ensure that Armenians working in other countries are covered by
    labour rights and safety rules.

    Currently, Yeganian said, many migrant workers have no contract and
    are entirely at the mercy of their employers when it comes to wages.

    He believes it is the duty of the state to step in and try to regulate
    the labour exodus.Yeganian hopes that the new law will secure the
    rights of migrants at inter-governmental level, so that Armenian
    embassies and consulates will have legitimate grounds to intervene
    and help their nationals.

    As a pilot initiative, the Armenian government signed an agreement with
    Qatar in April under which 23 nurses and 27 high-tech specialists
    will be travel to the Gulf state to work under pre-agreed terms
    and conditions.

    Armenia has experienced phenomenal levels of emigration since becoming
    independent in 1991. Parliamentary deputy Viktor Dallakian recalls
    that when the Soviet Union fell apart, many factories in Armenia closed
    down, and because the republic is not rich in natural resources,
    people took up trading or travelled abroad to seek work in order
    to feed their families. Dallakian reckons that one in every three
    Armenian families has at least one migrant worker among its members.

    Volodya Sarkisian is typical of the long-term migrants. "I'm a trained
    excavator operator," he said. "Unable to find a job in Armenia that
    would pay enough to feed my family, I have been working in Russia since
    1993, travelling from town to town, wherever I get offered a job."

    The outflow was highest between 1992 and 1998. Gagik Bleyan, who heads
    the employment office at the labour and social policy ministry, said
    the underlying causes - lack of jobs and plummeting income levels -
    were attributable to a succession of problems: the 1988 earthquake,
    the Nagorny Karabakh war and the economic blockade by Azerbaijan,
    and the painful transition to a market economy.

    Out-migration continues to be driven by factors such as unemployment,
    low wages, corruption and protectionism, Bleyan said.

    He estimates that more than one million Armenians, or a quarter of
    the country's population, have left for good in the past ten years.
    According to official figures released by his ministry, between 50,000
    and 60,000 Armenians, or 5.5 per cent of the able-bodied population,
    travel abroad as seasonal labour every year, but unofficial statistics
    suggest the figure may be much higher.

    A recent poll of Armenian households, conducted by the European Centre
    of Advanced Social Technologies, showed that urban residents are more
    likely to emigrate than rural people. In the capital Yerevan, the
    annual labour drain is estimated to be around 10.5 per cent. Shirak
    region in north-western Armenia, which was the worst hit by the 1988
    quake, holds the lead with 33 per cent, while Armavir in the west
    shows the lowest migration rate at 6.8 per cent.

    Bleyan notes that the profile of the migrant workers, and also their
    expectations, have changed since the Nineties. "People expect to make
    more money abroad," he said. "Computer programmers and economists
    are the hottest commodity. So now we see more highly qualified labour
    leaving the country than before."

    Bleyan is not alarmed by the scale of the labour drain, saying that
    polls indicated that it was no higher than elsewhere in the former
    Soviet Union.

    Nor does he think the state should interfere, or that Armenia needs
    to legislate on migrant labour. None of its former Soviet neighbours
    have such a law, he added.

    "Our existing labour laws regulate domestic and international
    labour flows quite well," he told IWPR. "Under the constitution,
    every citizen has the right to travel abroad, and no legislation can
    infringe that right."

    Yeganian at the government's migration office takes a different view,
    saying the state has an obligation to improve employment conditions
    for its nationals abroad. "As Armenia is unlikely to create enough
    jobs for all in the near future, the state should at least see to it
    that its citizens are treated well by their employers abroad," he said.

    Ovsep Khurdushian, a consultant on economics and diaspora affairs at
    the Armenian Centre for National and Strategic Studies, said migration
    is unavoidable, but if the government becomes involved it would help
    stimulate a gradual repatriation of labour as well as protection of
    migrants' rights abroad.

    "Many people simply leave without any prospects in sight," said
    Khurdushian. "I've heard of one Armenian woman who sold her property
    and went to Moscow with her three children. Finding no work there,
    she killed her children and then herself."

    Naira Melkumian is a freelance journalist based in Yerevan.
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