Fugitive labour

May 31, 2004 | 18:34
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The increasing number of Vietnamese migrant labourers who abscond from their overseas jobs are destroying the hard-working image of their countrymen, especially in Japan where the problem is threatening to close down the labour export trade. Hoang Mai investigates what the labour management authority and labour suppliers are doing to reverse the situation.

Many Vietnamese workers, including these pictured at a Vietnam-based firm, enjoy good relations with their Japanese employers
Le Quoc Khanh, director of labour supply company Trancimexco, is upset at the news he has just received from his Japanese partner the Hiroshima Association.
Twenty-three workers selected by Trancimexco after a rigorous recruitment process have been refused working visas by the Japan International Training Cooperation (JITCO).
Khanh said the official reply from JITCO came when the number of Vietnamese workers who were abandoning their jobs to become illegal Japanese residents was increasing at an alarming rate.
“I have never experienced any trouble like this. I am really upset because my company and those workers will suffer for something that is not our fault,” Khanh told Vietnam Investment Review.
Khanh admitted that Trancimexco had not decided how to deal with the 23 workers, but would try to convince them to work in South Korea instead.
Trancimexco began sending workers to Japan in 1998 and has sent 400 workers to the market so far.
Typically, workers are aged between 20 and 35, secondary school graduates, in good health and prepared to work far from home.
Traenco, another labour supplier, has just lost contracts for 30 workers for the same reason; JITCO refused to give them working visas.
“The situation can become even more difficult when an entire group of workers are sent home because a few of their group desert their jobs,” said Traenco official Tran Anh Trung.
But in worse news, Japanese association Tech One, which represents tens of Japanese employers, has decided to stop placing workers registered with Traenco.
Although the Japanese employers agreed to compensate the workers by paying them 70 per cent of their monthly salary, those workers still lost creditability because they were forced to return home.
“I understand the reason why Japanese authorities had to take extreme action in dealing with Vietnamese workers,” Trung said.
“However, this badly affects other colleagues who are working seriously, and local labour suppliers that are operating legally,”
He said Japan’s tougher stance had affected Traenco’s programme to send Vietnamese university graduates to work in Japan for three years.
Since 2002, Traenco has provided more than 300 university graduates to Japanese employers.
Under the labour contracts, the graduates work as an apprentice for the first year and are then fully employed for the second and third year.
“We do not want to see our programme go bankrupt. We need understanding from our Japanese partners that our [local labour suppliers] are doing their best to stop workers from running away,” Trung said.

Reasons to abscond
More than 10,000 Vietnamese are working in Japan. That figure has increased at an average of 2,000 workers every year since 1992.
The number of Vietnamese workers who break labour contracts to look for higher wages, has increased from 9.7 per cent in 1997 to 27.7 per cent in 2000 and to 18 per cent at present, according to the Vietnamese Embassy to Japan.
Vietnamese now have the worst rates for absconding among migrant workers from China, Thailand and the Philippines.
Le Quoc Khanh told Vietnam Investment Review that the workers that ran away were either looking for higher-paying jobs or did not intend to return to Vietnam.
While the monthly contracted salary for a Vietnamese worker in Japan averages $600-$700 for the first year of work, and between $1,000 and $1,500 in the second and the third years, the salary can be doubled – or even tripled – by working outside the contract.
Khanh said many small and medium companies in Japan agreed to employ illegal workers to dodge paying high employment taxes.
“Actually, they think if they live in Japan it will make their lives more comfortable than at home.
“I think it is an illusion because even if they earn a higher salary, they have to pay higher prices for food and housing, and live in a state of constant insecurity,” Khanh said.
“Additionally, if they are arrested by the Japanese police, they are immediately forced to go home without any money,” he said.
However Tran Luc, director of a local labour supplier, said a higher salary was not necessarily the motivation of most workers.
He criticised the habit of Japanese employers of keeping the monthly salaries of Vietnamese workers and paying them at the end of their contract.
Workers were only given around $200 for monthly living expenses, he said.
“We understand that this method is to prevent workers breaking their contracts. However, it produces the reverse effect,” said Luc.
“This method works for those who do not have any financial burden in their home country.
“But everyone knows that Vietnamese migrant workers have to borrow money from banks and their relatives to cover the expenses of their trip, and so they are encouraged to abscond by the fact that they have to pay back debts,” said Luc.

Useless prevention
Both Khanh and Luc have proposed that JITCO ask Japanese employers to pay part of the workers salary every month, to alleviate their anxiety.
“We are trying to prove to JITCO that this proposal will help reduce the number of runaways, but we have not yet received their support,” Khanh said.
“We are now trying to tighten our preventive measures even though we understand that our efforts alone will not be strong enough to stop people running away.”
Trancimexco is tackling the problem in several ways. The company no longer selects workers from provinces where there have been many cases of runaways including Ninh Binh, Hai Duong and Thanh Hoa.
The company has also raised the deposits workers are required to leave before their departure from $5,000 to $8,000, and now require the workers’ parents to put up their land-use rights books as guarantees.
If a worker abandons the job he is contracted to in Japan, he will lose the deposit and his parents could be taken to the court.
“Someone might argue that we will become well off from such a huge amount of deposits, but the amount is so small compared to our long-term credibility – our greatest asset as a labour supplier,” said Khanh.
Khanh said that those measures had helped Trancimexco reduce its ratio of absconders to 1 per cent of the workers the company sends to Japan.
The ratio used to be between 25 and 30 per cent.
Likewise, Traenco has invented its own method of protecting its reputation. Tran Anh Trung said sometimes families encouraged their children to abscond and earn more money.
“They [those families] assume that their children will have better lives outside,” said Trung.
“The only way we can prevent that is to set penalties as high as possible for those families.”
Besides the $12,000 deposit required from a migrant worker, Traenco asks families whose children are working in the same group in Japan to sign a memorandum agreeing to share responsibility.
Following this, a family that has an absconder, will compensate the remaining families with $500 for each month the worker does not fulfil his contract.
“Those preventative measures cannot stop people running away completely,” Trung admitted.
“But a lack of government intervention to put those measures in practice could mean the problem was never solved.”
Trung told Vietnam Investment Review that although government Decision No68 was issued in 2001 to regulate fleeing workers in Japan and South Korea, none of the local labour suppliers were able to use those regulations because they were not transparent.
An official with the Ministry of Labour, War Invalid and Social Affairs said the ministry was to revise the regulations and set higher penalties for workers who desert their jobs. But, when the regulations will be revised is not yet known.
Until then, young people hoping to improve their prospects by working overseas may be disappointed.

vir.com.vn

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