Sending Poor Workers Abroad: A Limp Handshake

Participating in labour export programme remains a distant dream for most workers in poor districts because of the limitations of qualifications, access to information and the inability to cover costs. To help remove difficulties for workers, Decision 71 has been issued, a special mechanism providing workers the incentive of free vocational training, language learning, accommodation, travel and orientation education, along with the mechanism of full loan support for country exit with low interest rates. Funding for the programme is about VND4,715 billion, of which support for workers is VND1,542 billion and credit VND3,173 billion.

 

According to the Department for Overseas Labour Management, the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA), after more than four years of implementation, more than 20,000 workers in poor districts have enrolled in this programme, of which more than 10,000 workers have been sent to markets like Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan (China), etc. The poor and ethnic minorities account for approximately 95 percent of this number.

 

By far, on average, each district only has about 325 workers registering for the programme; each village has about 22 workers. The number of workers in poor districts sent to work abroad is 161 per district and 9 per commune on average. This figure is too small compared to the huge demand of going to work abroad to get out of poverty.

 

Ms Hoang Kim Ngoc, former Deputy Director of the Department for Overseas Labour Management, who is in overall charge of the implementation of Decision 71, said that there were many causes for that situation, but the main one came from the low quality of Vietnamese labour. For every 10 workers enrolling in training and educational courses of businesses, 4-5 people abandoned the programmes. The participants’ behaviour is undisciplined; if they didn’t like the training, they would leave immediately. Therefore, to put an employee into the labour export programme following Decision 71 is quite a harsh task.

 

According to Decision 71, when workers in poor districts participate in the labour export programmes, they would receive support covering the full cost of accommodation, travel and orientation education in the form of pre-payment from labour exporters. And those pre-payments would be paid in full for businesses only after workers had left the country. With the current situation, when many employees dropped out of the training, many businesses have suffered losses of those pre-payment. It explains why, though more than 30 businesses participated at the start, now the programme has only 6 remaining. And there’s a high chance this number will continue to shrink if the situation remains unresolved!

 

It’s a fact that enterprises are frustrated with the lack of interaction from labours. But that's not all, because there is another problem stemming from businesses. Many businesses have poor management, giving full control of the implementation of the labour export programme to branches and paying no attention to the process of selection and training. They were making mistakes from the start, when doing recruitment and training without any contracts to send labourers to work overseas. Slowness of enterprises in organising an exit for employees also caused a loss of confidence among labourers, negatively impacting the implementation of the programme. On the other hand, there were businesses providing no vocational and language training for employees, not meeting commitments made during registration and written in contracts, also failing to comply with provisions of schedule of the labour export programme. Consequently, many workers’ overseas contracts ended prematurely, making the workers depressed and eroding confidence in businesses.

 

In addition, there’s another fact that workers left their overseas jobs because many provinces couldn’t do a good job in advocacy and communication to introduce quality labour resource for businesses. For example, there were many cases where workers were heavy drinkers, not in good health condition or qualified for the work (over 30 percent of employees introduced to businesses). From the perspective of state management, professional bodies also failed in the monitoring task and couldn’t prevent businesses from “blindly sending workers” or selecting participants without specific supply contracts.