All Resources in Vietnam

STUDY ON ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL IMPACTS OF COVID-19 ON INFORMAL MIGRANT WORKERS IN HANOI AND HO CHI MINH CITY-VIETNAM   
by  Action For Migrant Workers Network, Vietnam

INITIATIVES ON SOCIAL PROTECTION SUPPORTING VIETNAMESE WORKERS IN RESPONSE TO COVID-19  
By Center for Development and Integration, Vietnam

The study’s goal is to document initiatives of key stakeholders’ support to workers in the formal and informal sectors in response to the COVID-19 crisis, including two specific objectives: (i) to identify and map initiatives that support workers; and (ii) to share lessons learned and good practices actors in Vietnam and other countries in the region.

The Recommendation 202 on social protection floors (SPF), promoted by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and adopted in 2012, is intended to ensure essential health care and basic income security worldwide for children, people of working age who are unable to earn a sufficient income and the elderly. The SPF requires country members to develop a comprehensive social protection system including social security guarantees for the whole life cycle of citizens. However, social protection is very new to many grassroots organizations and proves to be complex in many levels.

AROSP Newsletter December 2018 edition is out.

In this issue:

This education module on capital mobility explains the capitalist crisis, and assesses the impact of capital mobility on workers and trade unions. The module also provides stories of workers in the global supply chains and their struggles.

This meeting report discussed the prospect of labour organising in Asia.

Southeast Asian economies show notable performance in the recent years. In 2013, for instance, the growth rate of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP) is 4.9 per cent compared to the entire world’s GDP growth rate of 3.0 per cent. However, despite this significant GDP growth rate, employment in Southeast Asia did not rise in the same rate as the GDP has risen. It has grown only by 1.5 per cent. Moreover, poverty remains prevalent and income gaps become wider. In other words, the economic growth in numbers does not translate to the improvement of the quality of lives of the people at the grassroots level.

The two-day meeting focused on understanding and mapping the landscape of labour resistance in Asia in the past decade or so, with a special focus on identifying, in each country, (1) emerging forms of labour resistance, (2) emerging actors and players in new labour movements, and (3) trends in emerging alliance building and collaborative initiatives.

Recognising that economies in Asia are developing very fast, there is a considerably widening gap in terms of income as indicated by the Gini coefficients per country. For example, in most of the countries including Laos and Vietnam the income gap has been widening while the economy grows. Aside from increasing informalisation of jobs, there are also other indicators indicating that the labor situation has not improved in the last decade. It is true that poverty in Asia is decreasing but relative poverty has been increasing which means that the income gap in society has become more serious. There are more self-employed and own account workers and more women than men in these categories. The situation of women is relatively worse than men in the informal economy because they have no voice and visibility particularly in   decision making processes.  Aside from increasing precarious work, the marginalised informal workers also suffer from privatisation of public goods. Increasing occupational risks comprise another difficulty faced by informal workers.

The Asian Roundtable on Social Protection (AROSP) meeting for Southeast Asian partners happened in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on 27-28 June 2014. It intends to consolidate the AROSP partners’ network in Southeast Asia towards the strengthening of the social protection advocacy in the region. It was attended by 30 participants (14 women and 16 men) representing workers’ organisations in different Southeast Asian countries including Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

This map tells the story of Samsung Electronics' Supply Chains and their working condition across Asia. It shows cases of occupational ill and victims in several Asian countries and key issues including labour union busting by Samsung companies and its suppliers and violence towards workers, among others.