[Vnbiz] Vietnam Businesses Struggle to Find Workers

[Hong-Phong_Pho at ita.doc.gov]

Thank you, anh Tai, for posting this very interesting and important 
article.
It broaches a very important subject that's central to the economic, 
political, social and all other aspects of a country's development: jobs.
We observe the paradoxical situation of "people, people everywhere, and 
not a worker to be found".  The article correctly identify the key 
problem/solution as vocational training.
We have a lot of people who need jobs and more jobs than qualified 
workers.  So the businesses need workers.
An entrepreneur is someone who identifies a need and make money satisfying 
that need.
Does anyone in this forum know of programs/businesses that train people 
for employment domestically?
HPP



"Phan, Tai" <Tai.Phan at ed.gov> 
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02/02/2007 09:24 AM
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[Vnbiz] Vietnam Businesses Struggle to Find Workers






[ Vietnam Business Forum ]

Vietnam Businesses Struggle to Find Workers 
 
 ) 
 
 
With Vietnam's economy booming, businesses are having a harder time 
recruiting staff. Some factories are running below capacity for want of 
workers. The shortage comes to a head during the traditional lunar New 
Year holiday, or Tet, when urban Vietnamese return to their native 
villages - and their employers hope they come back. From Hanoi, Matt 
Steinglass has more. 
With barely more than two weeks before Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year, 
the streets of Hanoi are starting to fill with the traditional decorations 
of kumquat trees and peach blossoms. Airline and train tickets for the 
holidays are already sold out, as city residents prepare to return to 
their ancestral villages for the holidays. 

Officially, the Vietnamese get a week off for Tet. But each year, some of 
them stay home for a few days longer. And some simply find work elsewhere, 
and never come back at all. 

It is a habit their employers do not appreciate, said Bui Van Tho, the 
personnel manager at the Viet Hung garment company in Hanoi. 

Tho says about 70 percent of his company's workers will come back from Tet 
on time. Twenty percent will come back late, and 10 percent will never 
come back. 

Nguyen Huu Dung, the head of Vietnam's Social and Labor Sciences 
Institute, says post-Tet no-shows have become a serious problem. 

Dung says at some garment companies, up to 40 percent of workers fail to 
come back after Tet. He says workers abandon their jobs if they can find 
similar ones in their home provinces. 
 
Investors crowd Saigon Securities Incorporation (SSI)'s trading floor in 
Ho Chi Minh city 
 
 

The problem is exacerbating a labor shortage in many sectors of Vietnam's 
booming economy. Nguyen Thanh Tung, the employment services director at Ho 
Chi Minh City's industrial parks board, says companies lack both skilled 
and manual laborers. 

Tung says the shortage has grown more severe over the past few years. He 
says technology companies in Ho Chi Minh City's industrial parks have been 
short by 500 to a 1,000 engineers for three years now. 

Increasingly, he says, somewhere between five and seven percent of 
high-tech workers fail to return after Tet. 

Labor shortages, surprisingly, are a common problem in the developed and 
developing East Asian countries, despite their often huge populations. 

Even in China, with its 1.3 billion people, many factory owners are 
experiencing a shortage of workers. 

Dang Trung Dung of the Vietnamese leather manufacturing company Ladoda has 
been seeking 50 skilled leatherworkers for four months. 

Dung says just four new skilled leatherworkers have turned up so far. 

The company's expert staff are stuck stitching wallets on the production 
line, he says, when they should be designing new products. 

Even as the factories starve for workers, Vietnam has a vast supply of 
surplus labor in the countryside. Almost 60 percent of the workforce works 
in the inefficient agricultural sector. 

Impoverished rural workers should be happy to find work in urban 
factories. But a 2005 report by the Asian Development Bank says the 
Vietnamese labor market suffers from "market segmentation" - that is, 
rural farm workers are not moving to fill the urban labor shortage. 

The ADB report says the government fails to enforce minimum wage and 
social insurance laws, which discourages farmers from taking factory jobs. 


Another problem is communist Vietnam's system of residency permits. Many 
migrant workers cannot get permits to live in big cities like Hanoi and Ho 
Chi Minh City. Without a residency permit, migrant workers have difficulty 
qualifying for public health care, or sending their children to school. 

But the Asian Development Bank says the main reason for the shortage is a 
lack of training. The ADB says government educational and training 
institutions "lack the capability to prepare the population" for the 
changing economy. 

Nguyen Huu Dung of the Social and Labor Sciences Institute says the 
government is working on the problem. 

Dung says vocational schools need to adapt to the skills that the market 
demands, and more links need to be made between schools and employers. 

That cannot happen soon enough for employment services manager Tung. 

Tung says it used to be that workers needed employers. Now, it is the 
employers who need the workers. And with Tet coming up, businesses can 
only hope their employees will still be there when the holidays end. 

VOA News 

 
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