HCMC – Vietnam’s labor structure remains little changed despite strong economic growth, with over half of the workforce still engaging themselves in agriculture where underemployment is a big concern, according to a seminar in HCMC last week.
As of end-2008, a total 23.6 million laborers, or 52.5% of the workforce, were still working in agriculture characterized by low productivity and low efficiency, said Nguyen Ba Ngoc, deputy director of the Institute for Labor and Social Sciences under the labor ministry.
Ngoc told the seminar in HCMC on Thursday that laborers in the manufacturing sector accounted for 20.83% of the total, and those in the service sector the remaining 26.55%.
The formal unemployment figure in the country, according to Ngoc, is a low 2%.
While agriculture draws the majority of the workforce, as many as 1.43 million people were underemployed, with 97% of them living in the countryside, he said. Meanwhile, many manufacturing facilities are facing a critical shortage of skilled laborers.
The biggest problem is that labor supply falls far short of demand, which indicates that training in Vietnam has not kept pace with socio-economic development. Another problem is that many people cannot find jobs after training, which also shows the country’s vocational system has not attended to labor demand.
Tran Van Thien, director of the HCMC Human Resource Development Institute, lamented the low productivity among Vietnamese laborers. Compared with other countries in the region, Vietnam’s productivity level is only 61.4% the average of ASEAN, 22% of Malaysia and 12.4% of Singapore, Thien said.
Thien therefore suggested changes in human resource training in the coming years to raise Vietnam’s productivity.
Lin Lean Lim of the International Labor Organisation (ILO) told the seminar that Vietnam should have better forecasts on labor demands in the coming years, and identify the fields that training should focus on.
In addition, policies should be made to encourage Vietnamese students to return home after furthering their studies overseas.
The seminar was held by the labor ministry to provide inputs for a scheme on labor market development for the 2011-2019 period.
