Protecting the workforce

Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan

Many companies claim they are short of thousands of labourers, while they are struggling to source workers. Is that the case?

Labour scarcity is a fact, however, it is untrue that firms lack thousands of labourers and the shortfall takes place over a long period of time. In fact, there exists an unfair competition among businesses based in industrial zones (IZs) in securing each other’s labourers.

Since businesses failed to create links with their labourers, their workers might easily quit jobs to join other firms though the wage difference was sometimes as minimal as VND100,000-VND200,000 ($5-$10) per month.

One should not look at the employment charts to think that enterprises are in a critical shortage of labourers as in many cases they issued a figure four to five times higher than their actual needs. Surveys show that some companies willingly pared off their ‘old’ labourers to receive ‘new’ ones just to evade their obligations of paying health and social insurance premiums.

Companies often bemoan the poor quality of staff and resulting training costs – how can the situation be improved?

That is a real problem and the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs will do its utmost to raise the rate of trained labourers to satisfy enterprises’ requirements.

Promoting vocational training is also important. Professional technical schools, colleges and universities need to consider their training syllabus and embrace on training professions that are needed by the society but not only train what they have. In doing so, they should look at Vietnam’s investment charts to find out what areas are in need of labourers, from there, they should work on plans on scale expansion and quality improvement.

IZ workers are said to be underpaid and the recent proposed salary hike is said to be not enough so many workers do not want to take on jobs even though they are in fact jobless. Is that the case?

Minimum salaries are set to ensure that employers at least do not underpay their labourers. In fact, a number of businesses, particularly private and foreign invested ones pay a bit higher than the minimum requirements. In this regard, it is important for labourers to negotiate wages directly with their employers.

The ability of workers to directly negotiate with employers about their wages is rather limited while trade unions have been criticised for not protecting labourers’ rights?

The trade union is addressing these problems. Accordingly, efforts have been made to have trade unions at private and foreign invested firms handle their responsibility of working with employers regarding labourers’ issues, such as wages and work conditions. The National Labour Relations Committee is also considering the issue.