 |
His limited experience and smattering of Chinese, which he obtained during his three years as a welder in Malaysia, were not enough to help him land a suitable job in the capital.
“It is not easy for manual workers like me to find jobs in the city. All firms require laborers with good experience,” Lai said.
He also could not manage to scrounge up the over US$1,000 to buy a motorbike to work as a motorbike taxi driver. He spent all of the nearly VND200 million ($10,526) he earned in Malaysia paying debts and building a house.
Finding work at home after working abroad has become a major problem for Vietnamese laborers. None of the eight others sent to work with Lai in 2005 got jobs upon their returns.
Each year, Vietnam sends some 60,000-70,000 laborers to work abroad. However, after rising from poverty thanks to the programs, many of them risk slipping back into destitution once they return home.
Welcome home
Nguyen Thi Mai has just come back home from Taiwan, where she worked as a nurse in a rest-home. But in Vietnam, the 30-year old woman has not been able to find a single job at a hospital or rest-home, so she has to work as a maid for a family in Hanoi.
“I have to do it, I don’t want my children to die of starvation. The income of VND1-2 million ($54.2- 108.3) I could make in the paddy fields would be enough for only a Spartan life,” said the woman from Nam Dinh Province.
The VND100 million ($5,263) she made in Taiwan has been spent on food and an education for her children, as well as debts and a new motorbike, which helps her husband carry their farm products to a wholesale market in the city.
Laborers, mostly the poor from rural areas, usually spend their earnings from abroad on debts, home appliances and building or upgrading their homes, not on investing in production or businesses.
With 5 years of work experience in a restaurant in Malaysia, Tran Quang Huong from Ninh Binh Province said he had planned to open a small restaurant when he returned home.
However, his family had to use his remittances of over VND100 million to pay hospital fees for his father, a cancer patient hospitalized in Hanoi.
Unable to find a suitable job in the restaurant business, Huong now has to work as a mason for hire.
“I am attending a cooking class in the evening. I still want to open a restaurant when I save enough money,” he said as he waited for work at labor-for-hire market on the capital city’s dusty and crowded Giang Vo Street.
Temporary measure
Dao Cong Hai, vice head of the Department of Overseas Laborer Management at the Ministry of
Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs, said his agency was working with commercial banks and financial institutions on requirements to give laborers who want to borrow money to work abroad. The requirements should ensure that the money they make abroad would be used more effectively and creates jobs, he said.
Nguyen Xuan Vui, chairman and general director of labor exporter Airseco, said workers returning home could use part of their earnings made working abroad to seek work again in other countries.
They could also ask the firms that send them abroad for more work, he added.
An official from the Vietnamese Association of Manpower Supply said many firms, especially Japanese and South Korean ones, wanted to employ local laborers that have worked in their countries, because they knew foreign languages and had appropriate experience.
Localities home to many foreign firms should establish websites to introduce jobs to laborers and encourage them to set aside part of the money they make overseas to develop production and business, contributing to the creation of jobs for themselves and others, he said.
“Laborers should think of working abroad as a way to bring them a temporary job. Long-term production and business development at home is the fundamental measure to improve life,” he said.
However, most people in poor villages that have a family member working abroad wait for their remittances to make any payments and rarely save, let alone make investments in production development.
VietNamNet/Thanh Nien
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.
