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.