Vietnam's overseas workers trapped in 'no-rights zone'
HANOI — Vietnam sends tens of thousands of workers a year to Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea and elsewhere, but unscrupulous operators trap many of them in conditions akin to slavery, experts say.
Countless Vietnamese women have been trafficked abroad for prostitution, but even more "guest workers" have found themselves in an equally mundane kind of hell -- exploited, abused and bankrupted.
"It's like indentured labour because of the debt that the workers have to take on," said Professor Daniele Belanger, director of the Population Studies Centre at the University of Western Ontario.
Overseas workers typically pay large fees and hand their passports to their new bosses, said Belanger, whose research team has interviewed Vietnamese migrant workers in Taiwan and South Korea, as well as dozens of returnees.
The contracts effectively trap workers in a "no-rights zone," and many end up only increasing their debt, Belanger said, as recruiters add extra costs including medical and criminal background checks, training courses, living expenses and taxes.
"The workers at least have to pay the debt back and a lot of them don't even manage to do that because the fees and interest rates are very high," she said.
Most labourers effectively work for free for the first year, she said.
In one typical case, reported recently by Vietnamese state media, a man from Danang, central Vietnam said last year that he was cheated after signing a three-year contract to work as a painter in Malaysia.
Belanger said her study, funded by Canada's International Development Research Centre, found that only some labourers brought money home from Taiwan, the top sum being 7,000 dollars in three years.
"Some of the migrants we interviewed had been victims of trafficking and had dealt with what they called 'faked agencies' that they could no longer trace after having returned," Belanger wrote in a recent paper.
Many Vietnamese are lured into overseas job contracts -- usually as factory, construction or domestic workers -- by unscrupulous operators.
"There are middlemen, each taking some money," said Andrew Bruce, Vietnam chief of the International Organisation for Migration. "Someone will introduce you to someone who'll introduce you to someone, and finally you get to the end of the line and you've got that great job."
But all too often, people fall victim to fraud, he said.
"They end up on a plane with a tourist visa and they arrive in another country and there is no one there to meet them and there is no job there at all."
Others have to borrow large sums, often using their family land as collateral, only to discover later that they earn too little to repay the loans, with shortfalls of hundreds of dollars per year, Bruce said.
Workers are often tied to one employer, leaving them trapped, he said.
Some of the worst abuses have taken place on the open seas, as Vietnamese fishermen have been recruited to work on Taiwanese fishing fleets in conditions Vietnam's Tuoi Tre (Young People) newspaper likened to "slave galleys," working 18 hours for four hours' rest.
Labour exports aim to keep down unemployment in Vietnam, where an estimated 1.2 million people enter the job market each year, and earn cash to feed Vietnam's fast growing economy.
Last year 400,000 Vietnamese working in more than 40 countries earned an estimated 1.6 billion dollars.
Vietnam has set a target of sending 80,000 workers abroad this year, and 100,000 annually by 2010, says the Department of Management of Overseas Labourers under the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs.
The top destinations now are Malaysia, which took nearly half of all workers last year, followed by Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, with the Middle East a fast-growing market.
Remittances have been key earners for other Asian countries such as the Philippines, which has sent nearly 10 percent of its population abroad.
But Vietnam, as a relative newcomer to the inter-Asian migrant labour industry, has not yet set up systems to protect all its overseas workers.
Some experts say Vietnam needs to clean up the system if it wants to send more guest workers to the United States, the European Union and Australia.
"This whole situation negatively impacts on the country?s efforts to penetrate new markets in the industrialized countries," said Bruce.
Agence France Presse - November 18, 2007.
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