VietNamNet Bridge – A common scene at Viet Nam's two biggest airports – Noi Bai in Ha Noi and Tan Son Nhat in HCM City – are lines of young people in factory uniforms waiting for flights to South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Russia, Libya and Saudi Arabia, or even further.

The youths, most of whom have never set foot on a plane, are off to become guest workers abroad. They hope to save hundreds of millions of dong in a couple of years, something they could never do back home.

Throughout Viet Nam, the money they send back home has transformed poor villages into communities with multi-story houses. Some villages are even known as "the South Korean village" or "the Taiwanese village" because of the amount of cash these hard workers pump into them.

That's the good side. But there's another side, the stories we've seen in the media about how guest workers are mistreated, conned into paying outrageous fees to intermediaries – or who quit their jobs and become illegal settlers.

South Korea recently announced it would stop receiving Vietnamese guest workers due to the astonishingly high number of guest workers – about 15,000 – who cancelled their contracts to work for other employers.

In mid-September, devastating news arrived. Fourteen Vietnamese workers were killed in a deadly fire that broke out at a garment factory in Russia. The Russian media reported that they were employed illegally.

The ashes of the victims were transported back to Viet Nam at the end of September, shattering the dreams of their families.

The country's labour-export picture is so complex that it's hard to pinpoint the problems and come up with the remedies. One thing for sure is that workers, most of them poor youngsters from rural areas, are the most vulnerable part of a system that involves governments, authorities, export labour companies, intermediaries and brokers, partnering companies abroad and training centres.

In 2008, the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs issued a decision that outlined the level of fees that workers have to pay for working in various labour markets and in certain sectors. For example, the maximum amount workers have to pay labour exporting companies to work in Taiwan is between US$800-1,500. This applies to those working in factories, construction, house-keeping and health services. For the Japanese market, the maximum fee is $1,500 for all sectors.

But in reality, workers are subjected to much higher fees. This forces them to borrow from banks and burdens them with intensive debts when they go abroad. The only way some can pay these debts is to flee their low-paid jobs and seek better ones.

According to local media reports, workers from northern Thai Binh Province often pay about $7,000 to work in South Korea. In central Ha Tinh Province, some workers are said to have to pay thousands of dollars to work in Malaysia in return for monthly salaries of a couple of hundred dollars.

A worker in northern Hai Duong Province interviewed by Viet Nam News said he paid $5,000 to a broker to get work in Taiwan way back in 2003. The figures are much higher now. For all these workers, borrowing such large amounts of money is a do-or-die gamble.

Official statistics put the number of Vietnamese workers in Taiwan at 93,000, but since 2003, the number of workers fleeing their contracts was estimated at 6,600 annually. Most workers flee in search of better-paying jobs to cover the high fees paid to brokers.

These situations, particularly in South Korea, call for our labour ministry and other relevant agencies to tie up the complicated export-labour process. The task has to be tackled at every level, from selecting and training workers, screening qualified and reliable labour-exporting companies, revising and re-assessing Viet Nam's legal framework on labour exporting – and all management agencies involved.

Efforts must also be made to build up trust in foreign countries by ensuring that choosing to work abroad as guest workers should not be so risky. The goal is to make the process transparent and professional so that both workers and labour exporting companies benefit.

Raising awareness amongst workers is also necessary. They need better information on the official guest-worker programmes and need to be made aware of the risks involved in working with intermediaries.

There are clearly not enough statistics on issues related to labour exporting. There needs to be a re-assessment of all markets, the number of workers in each category of sectors and, most importantly, the number of labour exporting companies, agencies and training centres at national and provincial levels.

Protecting our guest workers abroad should be a task that begins at home. Our national pride demands it.

VietNamNet/VNS