John Baptist Dang Thanh Cau stands before his rented house in Thua Thien Hue province. (Photo: UCA News)
Agnes Trinh Lan Anh works at a local garment company and toils even on Sundays.
The 27-year-old, employed at a joint stock company in Thua Thien Hue province in Vietnam, has put off her marriage plans due to a paucity of funds.
“I am on a salary of six million dong (US$250) that I find difficult to live on,” she quipped.
She cut her expenses by limiting social events by sharing a 20-square-meter bed space, costing 2.2 million dong per month, with her friend.
There she stays put sans power, gas, and with only a little water.
“I sometimes don't have enough money to buy food for myself and to send home to support my mother and niece,” said the woman, who goes to the workstation on a motorbike.
Anh was supposed to tie the nuptial knot this month with her boyfriend, who is a worker at a state-run rubber plantation in Thua Thien Hue province.
Anh said five of her friends postponed their weddings this year due to economic woes in the Southeast Asian Communist nation, touted as the fastest-growing economy in Asia until last year.
A survey by Vietnam's General Confederation of Labour’s Institute for Workers and Trade Unions shed light on the current plight of workers in the country.
The respondents were paid workers from 157 businesses in the capital Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and four provinces in the country.
They were surveyed on their living and working conditions, besides their incomes.
The survey report, released in August, said 53 percent of the workers have to work overtime to meet the skyrocketing daily expenses.
John Baptist Dang Thanh Cau, a manual worker at a local cement company and father of two daughters, said he dares not have a boy despite his parents asking him to have one to perpetuate the family line.
“Now we struggle hard to support our four-member family,” Cau, 42, said, adding that he receives a salary of 7 million dong (US$291).
On holidays and on Sundays, he goes fishing in lakes and rivers for food.
His wife does the housework for a local family and earns 1.5 million dong per month.
He said he borrowed 15 million dong from a local moneylender to cover his daughter’s surgical operation in September. The monthly interest on the loan is 750,000 dong.
“We do not know how to make money to repay 17,250,000 dong total in November,” he said.
The lender has threatened to confiscate the motorbike that he uses to go to work.
Because of falling orders this year, Cau's company with a total of 370 workers gave the pink slip to 25 people and forced 50 others to opt for reduced working hours.
Tran Ngoc Nam has applied for a new job with three companies since he lost his job at a sports firm last year.
Nam, in a ragged T-shirt and jeans, said he sometimes works as a daily wage earner at construction sites for a living.
“I fainted three times because of heatstroke.”
“My wife and I dare not spend any money on ourselves. We save it to pay rent, and water and power bills. We have no clue about our future,” said the 37-year-old man, who has turned pale and thin.
Since 2000, Vietnam’s GDP has grown faster than that of any Asian country save China. Initially, apparel makers like Nike and Adidas came to test the waters as Vietnam has one of the highest female labor-force participation rates in the world. Soon, a boom in electronics and higher-value goods followed.
Currently, Asia’s fastest-growing economy is passing through a meltdown. Its 3.3 percent GDP growth in the first three months of 2023 is not all a big deal going by its past track record.
Experts forecast 4.2 percent GDP growth this year, down by nearly half from the 8 percent posted last year.
The country is known for its export of phones, electronic goods, clothes, shoes, and wood products. China is the top buyer of Vietnamese exports after the US.
The first quarter of 2023 saw a significant fall in exports, plunging by 11.9 percent year-on-year. Exports to Russia suffered 60 percent in January and February compared with the year earlier.
South Korean firms reduced their investment in Vietnam by a whopping 70.4 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2023, totaling US$474 million.
The tumultuous period in the nation’s economy is marked by a decline in exports and investment, which has put a spoke into the nation’s growth prospects.
Up to 2022, Vietnam was riding high with its achievement of exceeding US$ 400 billion in GDP, accompanied by an annual growth rate of 8.02 percent, the highest in 12 years.
Given the mounting complexities, the government’s target of 6.5 percent annual GDP growth seems increasingly unattainable.
Vietnam was once considered competitive for international trade and manufacturing industries due to its strategic location and cheap labor.
Many Western firms moved their operations from China to Vietnam after a communist China became costly for many manufacturers and the trade war between China and the US started in 2018.
If the labor cost in Vietnam is $2.99 per hour, it is $6.50 per hour in China. Transnational firms’ hunger for cheaper labor made Vietnam the talk of the town then.
Now, workers like Agnes, Cau and Nam are willing to work for little in the impersonally digitized world as Vietnam’s global competitiveness has suffered a serious beating.
