Vietnamese workers striking for better pay;
Foreign-owned plants hit hardest as number of walkouts grows

Roger Mitton, Vietnam Correspondent

HANOI - Some 300 workers walked out of a Singapore-managed factory in central Vietnam last week as wildcat strikes continued to spread in the country.

They claimed their current wage of $54US ($73S) a month at the CCI electronics plant was not enough to survive on amid surging inflation.

The management offered them $1US more a month, provided they agreed to obey factory rules and not cause any future disruptions.

Dissatisfied with the offer, they stormed out. The factory remains closed.

It is an increasingly common scene repeated in Vietnam as low-income workers refuse to accept monthly wages that are often less than what managers and their politically connected local partners spend on lunch.

Adding impetus to such perceptions of economic injustice is the fact that inflation in Vietnam has rocketed to levels unseen anywhere else in Asia.

Officially, the inflation rate is around 20 per cent, but it is much higher for essential items needed by most workers.

Food costs, for instance, have gone up 30 per cent, and fuel and rents by an even greater amount.

Workers also gripe about enforced overtime, poor quality factory food, lack of employment contracts giving them some security and the absence of protection against workplace hazards.

'If company managers pay the very minimum wage and expect workers to work overtime and give them poor food in the canteen, and sometimes do not pay bonuses, you cannot blame them for going on strike,' said Dr Trinh Duy Luan, director of Hanoi's Institute for Sociology Studies.

There has been an unprecedented number of angry workers walking out on their jobs.

There were more than 500 strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers last year, but the situation looks set to be much worse this year.

Most strikes have been at foreign-owned plants. Recently, 10,000 staff stormed out of a Hong Kong-owned toy company after getting only $30US in annual bonus.

Earlier this month, in perhaps the most devastating blow to Vietnam's already tattered image as a stable location for investors, 17,000 workers walked out on their jobs at a factory making shoes for global brand Nike, which has 50 operations in Vietnam.

It was the second major work stoppage to hit Nike in recent months. After failing to get a 22 per cent raise on their $58US a month salary, some workers were unhappy, and fights broke out.

'The government is to blame for not properly monitoring the labour situation, and for letting inflation rise so much that workers are getting poorer, even if their wages are increased a little,' said Dr Luan.

The communist regime has come under fire for giving priority to managers and for pandering to foreign investors.

Striking workers complain that the government penalises them for fighting for a livable wage, while turning a blind eye as top party officials help smoothen deals for investors and get handsome payoffs in return.

But the government has been reluctant to raise wages, fearing this could put off investors. To deter workers from participating in wildcat strikes, the government has warned that those who do so will have to pay their employers up to three months' salary as compensation.

But this would only exacerbate labour strife, which has already sent shivers of apprehension through the business community, especially foreign-owned companies.

'The growing numbers of strikes may well hurt Vietnam's image and upset potential investors, who might wonder if the labour market and the country as a whole is not so stable after all,' warned Dr Nguyen Quang A, director of Hanoi's Institute for Development Studies.