Japan to recruit Bangladeshi workers under new skills deal from 2027
Japan will start recruiting Bangladeshi workers under a new skills agreement from 1 April 2027. The deal promises equal legal protection and bars discrimination over pregnancy and childbirth.
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In a Nutshell
- Bangladesh and Japan signed the Employment Skills Development Memorandum of Cooperation on 17 October, after nearly a year of talks.
- Recruitment under the agreement is due to begin on 1 April 2027.
- The agreement runs for five years and renews automatically for another five.
- According to the Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment, workers will have the same legal protection as Japanese workers and equal workplace opportunities regardless of gender.
- The agreement bars dismissal or discrimination over pregnancy or childbirth and does not require women to return to Bangladesh for those reasons.
- Copies will be formally exchanged during Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s upcoming visit to Japan. The announcement gave no recruitment quota or wage scale.
Context
The agreement is timed to Japan’s new employment and skills development system, which replaces the Technical Intern Training Program in April 2027. The old programme offered foreign workers a way into Japan but drew years of complaints about exploitation, low pay and rules that tied workers to one employer.
Why It Matters
Many Bangladeshi migrants pay heavily to go abroad and end up in low-paid work, partly because few leave with recognised skills or language training. A route into Japan built around training could change that for the workers who get through it, and give them skills that pay better later. Remittances reached a record $32.8 billion in calendar year 2025. Japan is still a small destination for Bangladeshi workers, so the agreement will not move that figure soon. Its value lies in adding a better-paid, skills-based market to a migration economy that still leans heavily on low-wage work, provided Bangladesh can supply workers who meet Japan’s language and skills requirements.
What We Think
The protection clauses are encouraging, particularly for women. Japan’s own inspection data shows how far written rights and working conditions can drift apart. In 2025, labour inspectors found violations at 73.2% of workplaces they inspected that employed technical interns, and at 76.5% of those that employed specified skilled workers, most often related to safety standards and overtime pay.
Those inspections targeted workplaces already suspected of breaches, so the figures are not a national rate. They still show where the risks sit. The real test of this agreement is whether workers have someone to complain to, how quickly complaints are handled, and whether Bangladesh’s embassy in Tokyo is equipped to follow up.