Helping people grasp work opportunities Vietnam’s labour market has been in transition away from agriculture toward a free market led manufacturing and services economy with a fast-growing middle class for the past three decades. Observed through an employment lens, there are innumerable signs that the labour market has not kept pace with market demand and thus far has placed constraints on the stride of the country’s economic growth. Moreover, the transition from an agrarian, rural and informal economy, to an urban, manufacturing and services-based and formal economy is not complete and by all appearances the lack of qualified workers may continue to plague future economic growth. “Almost half of the country’s workforce is still engaged in small-scale agriculture,” said Yoshiteru Uramoto, at a recent conference in Hanoi addressing the shortcomings of the nation’s labour forces. The current deputy to the director general of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) said these workers are stuck in largely unproductive work with low pay and poor working conditions. Transitioning them out of agriculture and into the manufacturing industry, where they can become highly productive and earn a middle income salary has to be a top priority undertaken post haste, he said. Doan Mau Diep, deputy minister of the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MoLISA) in turn agreed. “The government has been making steady progress and fully expects that headway to continue over the next year,” said Mr Diep. All of the economic indicators for 2016 are positive, said Mr Diep, and by the end of the year the nation will have 77.8% of the working age population, an estimated 55.3 million people, in the formal workforce. “This is an all-time record high,” said Mr Diep, but more importantly he said, by the end of the year “the number of workers in the transport and storage industries will increase by 8.8%.” In addition, the number of workers in manufacturing and processing will jump by 8.2% and there will be an additional 4.5% bump in the number of workers in the information and communications technologies fields. So all told by the end of this year, then nation will see a 21.5% hike in the number of workers transitioned into employment that will put them on an upward trajectory to lift themselves out of poverty and into the middle class. “So far, the process has been three pronged,” said Mr Diep. The first prong has been the country’s long transition from a mainly planned to a modern, free market-led economy with a larger middle class. The second prong, urbanization, has led to the movement of people and jobs from rural villages to urban centres. Finally, said Mr Diep, through formalization relatively insecure and unproductive jobs have begun to be replaced by others that offer better protection and more productive opportunities. Still, Mr Diep admits, a lot more needs to be done to help people grasp work opportunities, if the change process started in the mid-1980s with the doi moi reforms are to become a reality for the benefit of all of the nation’s peoples. VOV