EFE.- After overcoming its worst Covid-19 crisis so far, Vietnam, one of the world’s factories, is having trouble reviving the industry around its economic capital, of which hundreds of thousands of workers have fled in recent months who no longer want to leave their home provinces for fear of the virus.
Teo is one of the 1.3 million workers who, according to government data, left the megacity of Ho Chi Minh (formerly Saigon) between July and September, when the most populous city in the country suffered the worst wave of coronavirus that Vietnam has known.
He could not leave until September, after enduring four months without salary (4.7 million Vietnamese lost their jobs in the summer), but he does not want to return to the big city from his rural province of An Giang until he is certain that the pandemic has lagged behind.
“I will dedicate myself to agriculture and other tasks. I will wait until February or March to see if the situation has improved. Right now in the city anything can happen ”, he says.
Drop in production for Christmas
After a forced stoppage between July and September in the largest factories around Ho Chi Minh (some of the smaller ones managed to operate for a few weeks with the workers sleeping in the workplace), in October the activity was resumed, but the accumulated delay in production seems irrecoverable in the face of Christmas.
The situation largely affects textiles and footwear, but also other sectors in which Vietnam is at the forefront, such as furniture or electronics, with the addition that in recent years many foreign companies had transferred part of their production from China due to lower wage costs and the trade war between China and the United States.
Millions of sports shoes and other products from brands such as Nike and Adidas or furniture are manufactured in the surroundings of Ho Chi Minh that end up being sold in Europe and the United States, while the country has become an important productive center for brands such as Samsung and Apple. .
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“The new normal is going to be to have 70 or 80% workers. Those who have left directly say that they do not return, that they stay with the family and growing rice, and we are having serious problems finding employees ”, says a footwear entrepreneur who prefers to remain anonymous.
The textile and footwear entrepreneurs, two of the great engines of the Vietnamese industry hope, hopefully, to have 80% of the positions filled in the coming weeks and already take for granted that between 15 and 20% will not return.
“I doubt that most migrant workers will go back to work in urban areas before the Lunar New Year holidays (in February) ”, said in a recent article in VnExpress Nguyen Hong Ha, head of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Vietnam.
Among the reasons for this resignation, Ha highlights the feeling of insecurity regarding the pandemic -especially in the neighboring provinces of Ho Chi Minh where the vaccination rate is still low-, the psychological damage suffered during the months of forced confinement and the high cost of living in the city compared to the countryside.
Pandemic restrictions
Even those residing in the city’s industrial belt (especially Binh Duong and Dong Nai provinces) are not always available due to restrictions related to the pandemic.
If a worker lives in an area where there has been a contagion in the last 7 days, they will not be able to go to work, as well as those not vaccinated, still abundant among the youth of those provinces, with inoculation rates much lower than in the city due to lack of supply.
Secondly, production costs are increasing because many workers who are willing to continue have seen in this situation an opportunity to demand higher wages (The minimum wage is around $ 200 a month in Ho Chi Minh, but an experienced technician can earn around $ 600).
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Lost production
Despite this problem, the businessman does not believe that this affects the position of Vietnam as a productive center, as it is a specific problem that it will be resolved in the coming months as vaccination advances and the population’s fear of the virus decreases.
During the first year of the pandemic, the country barely had 35 deaths and a few hundred infections thanks to the rapid adoption of measures such as the closing of the borders and managed to achieve a GDP increase of 2.9%.
Forecasts spoke of exceeding 6% growth this year, but the emergence of the delta variant changed the landscape in 2021, with more than a million infections in total and more than 23,000 deaths, more than 75% in Ho Chi Minh and its surroundings, which has multiplied the economic impact.
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