As the nation faces mounting layoffs in coming years even as millions of new workers stream into the job market, a meeting of Vietnam's labor unions emphasized rhetoric over substance. To be sure, the Party Plenum, a meeting of Vietnam's highest level of government, already set the tone of policy making when it met last month by emphasizing political stability and backing away from economic reform.
Labor unions fall near the bottom of Vietnam's complex political structure.
Vietnamese economists say hefty layoffs are likely as state-controlled companies eventually seek to become more competitive. Asian manufacturers in particular have been forced to shut assembly lines as Vietnam's labor costs rise relative to those of its neighbors with depreciated currencies and investors are forced to focus on their own troubled economies. Partly because Vietnam is heavily dependent on the rest of the region's markets, revenues from foreign investment and exports are also plummeting, shaving gross domestic product by at least a third from the same period of 1997, according to official figures. That leaves less money in government coffers to keep an army of state workers employed, and little in the way of a social safety net to catch the fallout, economists warn. These are just some of the employment issues the government needs to address to avoid social unrest, says Nguyen Minh Tu, a director of the Central Institute for Economic Management, a government-controlled think tank.