Yerevan to Help Armenian Migrants

Thursday, 5 May, 2005

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Naira Melkumyan

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.