Fears service sector may labour under WTO changes

A lack of skilled workers is turning the screw on Vietnam’s labour pool

Le Duy Dong, vice minister of the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (Molisa) said he was concerned that overseas labourers were holding higher positions and getting better paid than local workers.
“I am concerned that the pay of 20 Japanese employees in a cement venture is equal to the remaining 2,000 Vietnamese workers in the facility,” he said, adding that roughly 40 per cent of employment in the banking and health sectors, which offer average payments of $14,000 per person per year, is also given to foreigners.
As soon as Vietnam enters the World Trade Organization, the country’s service sector will open up, and foreign investors and businesses will find it much easier to bring foreign workers in, he said.
Molisa figures show that roughly 75 per cent of Vietnam’s 44.4 million labour pool at the end of last year was unskilled, meaning that a massive proportion of the labour force has not gone through any job training before taking up employment.
Added to incompetent skill levels, the labour productivity of a Vietnamese worker is classified as two to 15 times lower than that of other Asean colleagues. Due to a lack of skilled workers, productivity has only grown at a slow pace of 4-5 per cent per annum.
“Abundant quantity of the local labour force will no longer be a big advantage of Vietnam when the country enters the global economy.



It is high time we look into the quality of the human resources so that we can develop hi-tech and highly profitable skills rather than labour-intensive and low profit industries,” Dong said.
Sachio Kageyama, general director of Canon Vietnam, which employs almost 6,000 local workers and plans to recruit an additional 10,000 local workers for its two new factories, shared similar concerns.
“Vietnam offers rich human resources but the quality is still debatable,” said Kageyama. “Additionally, at a time when more foreign investors are looking for business and investment opportunities in Vietnam, the limited number of skilled workers will prevent them from investing here.”
He suggested that the labour training task, in which the Vietnamese government must take major responsibility, had to be improved if Vietnam wanted to change its labour image.
Vice minister Dong said that Molisa was working on a road map to raise the ratio of Vietnamese skilled workers from 25 per cent to 40 per cent by 2010.


No. 750/February 27-March 5, 2006