VietNamNet Bridge – Attempts by foreign-invested enterprises to recruit foreign workers have been facing strong opposition from labor unions, which say that Vietnamese workers are losing jobs to foreigners.

Analysts, however, have said that Vietnam is pursuing a “closed policy” in its recruitment of foreign workers. Policymakers have tried to set limitations in legal documents on the recruitment of foreign workers.

In 2003, the government’s Decree No 105 was released, stipulating that employers could recruit foreign workers, but the number of workers must not be higher than 3 percent of the enterprises’ total workers, and no higher than 50.

In many cases, where the 3 percent proportion was not applied, employers still had to ask for permission from local authorities, which made a decision “after considering the situation”.

The 3 percent limit had been a major headache to many foreign-invested enterprises for years and had caused heated arguments at business forums.

Educators, for example, continued to complain that the regulation was “unreasonable”, saying that they needed to recruit foreign citizens to work as English teachers to ensure high quality education.

After Vietnam has joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), the 3 percent cap was lifted. However, this does not mean that foreign workers can easily join the Vietnamese labor market.

Foreign investors’ associations, in dialogue with government agencies, said that Decree No 34 dated in 2008, the Decree No 46 released in 2011 and Decree No 102 in 2013 had loosened requirements on foreign worker recruitment, but the regulations remained “relatively strict”.

A local newspaper, when reporting that 10,000 Chinese workers will come to Vietnam to work at Formosa’s construction site in Vung Ang Economic Zone, commented that the number is enough to form a “military division”, implying an overly high number of foreign workers.

The official admitted that the decrees and legal documents on foreign worker employment have been amended regularly, once every two years, because the old regulations turned out to be unreasonable after a period of application.

While Vietnamese economists and labor unions criticized policymakers for “setting up loose discipline” in foreign labor employment, the Labor Working Group of the Vietnam Business Forum (VBF) said that employers recruit foreign workers because of the lack of a qualified domestic workforce, not because they want to take jobs away from Vietnamese.

Under Vietnam’s commitments, work permit exemption is applied to workers in 11 service sectors.

A report showed that by the end of 2013, over 77,000 foreign workers had joined the Vietnamese labor market. Of these, 40,529 had been granted work permits.

TBKTVN