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Tag: work

  • Vietnamese airlines continue to be plagued by pilot shortage

    Vietnamese airlines continue to be plagued by pilot shortage

    With increasing demand for pilots as they expand, Vietnamese airlines have had to raise salaries, spend more on training and hire foreign pilots. Figures from the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam show that by 2020 Vietnam will need a total of 2,680 pilots for commercial flights, 1,320 more than now. Vietnam Airlines, the country’s flag carrier, needs to hire 193 more pilots to increase the number on its payroll to 1,293 pilots to meet demand in 2019, according to the carrier’s recent assessment report.

    The assessment forecast the demand to keep rising increasing to 1,340 by 2020 and 1,570 by 2025. This is a challenging number given the increasing shortage of pilots globally, according to industry insiders.

    According to a recent report from Boeing, the global aviation industry will need 790,000 new pilots by 2037, or double the current number, driven by an anticipated doubling of the commercial airplane fleet, record travel demand and tightening labor supply.

    Pilot training has always been extremely expensive, with stringent health and technical knowledge requirements, meaning that the number of pilots qualifying is always limited, according to industry insiders.

    A former Vietnam Airlines pilot revealed that because of the shortage, soon after he gave notice of termination he received many offers from airlines both domestic and foreign.

    He said many other pilots at Vietnam Airlines also constantly offered 15-25 percent higher salaries by head hunters.

    As a result the carrier has been focusing on hiring trainees. Duong Tri Thanh, its general director, said given the global shortage of pilots and carry out its expansion plans in time, Vietnam Airlines has been training internally and recruiting foreign pilots despite high costs.

    Similarly, Jetstar Pacific or Vietjet Air are facing difficulties filling their vacancies with pilots when trying to rapidly expand in South Korea, Japan, and other countries in Southeast Asia. Currently, the number of pilots at these firms is largely foreign due to limited domestic supply. Typically, at Jetstar Pacific, foreign pilots account for 80 percent of their fleet.

    However, foreign pilots can be hard to come by since many other companies in Asia can offer them better remuneration and working conditions.

    An aviation expert said airlines need to combat the pilot shortage by investing in training facilities and recruitment programs and subsidizing training for pilot trainees.

    Vietnam’s aviation industry has been growing rapidly in recent years. There were 12.5 million air passengers last year, up 14.4 percent from 2017.

    The number of flights in the country grew by 16 percent on average between 2010 and 2017, according to official data.

    Vienam’s five airlines are Vietnam Airlines, its low-cost carrier Jetstar Pacific, budget airline Vietjet Aviation, Bamboo Airways and Vietnam Air Services Co.

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  • Vietnam makes debut in Bloomberg innovative economy index

    Vietnam makes debut in Bloomberg innovative economy index

    Vietnam has for the first time entered the Bloomberg Innovation Index of the world’s 60 most innovative economies. It scored 45.92 out of 100 in the 2019 index. Other new entrants include India, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Bloomberg said: “The index analyzes dozens of criteria using seven metrics, including research and development spending, manufacturing capability and concentration of high-tech public companies.”

    Vietnam’s highest rankings were 34th in high-tech density and 39th in patent activity. It ranked a lowly 59th in productivity.

    Its productivity in 2017 was among the lowest in Asia despite growth, according to the Vietnam Annual Economic Report released by the Vietnam Institute for Economic and Policy last year.

    An average Vietnamese worker made VND60.73 million ($2,600), lower than the rate for Cambodia, Indonesia Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, it said.

    In the Bloomberg index, South Korea retained its top place from last year and was followed by Germany, Finland, Switzerland, and Israel.

    Other Southeast Asian countries were Singapore in sixth place, Malaysia (26th) and Thailand (40th).

  • Japan offers most overseas jobs for Vietnamese workers

    Japan offers most overseas jobs for Vietnamese workers

    Japan is expected to receive more Vietnamese workers this year, having become the most attractive labor export market in 2018. Last year marked the first time Japan became the most popular destination for Vietnamese migrant workers with over 68,700 people finding jobs there, beating Taiwan with nearly 60,400 people and South Korea with over 6,500, according to statistics released by the Department of Overseas Labor.

    The department’s deputy director, Nguyen Gia Liem, said the Japanese market’s rise in popularity was due to the implementation of a new law that allows migrant workers to stay for five years instead of three.

    Furthermore, Vietnam was the first country to sign with Japan a memorandum of cooperation on the latter’s technical intern training program, which came into effect last June.

    In 2018, a total of 13 Vietnamese businesses were also licensed to directly bring Vietnamese citizens to Japan to work as caregivers. The long language and skill training required, however, limited the number of Vietnamese citizens taking this route last year.

    However, Liem asserted: “These establishments would help increase even further the number of Vietnamese laborers going to Japan.”

    Deputy Minister of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, Doan Mau Diep, has said the ministry will reduce the number of labor export firms. The move follows last October’s request by Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that Vietnam shut down bad labor export agencies and reduce costs for people wanting to work abroad.

    “The country currently has 2,000 companies taking workers overseas, which is too many, causing companies to compete with each other for contracts, and they collect high fees,” Diep said.

    The ministry would also review current regulations on overseas students to prevent this system from being abused as many Vietnamese citizens wanting to work in Japan have been using student visas in recent years to reduce cost and time spent on language and skills training.

    Last year, Japanese authorities already reviewed and suspended multiple companies for taking Vietnamese workers to Japan under the guise of international students.

    Diep also warned that citizens wanting to work overseas need to use legal labor export firms and not use tourist visas, as happened in the recent infamous case in Taiwan.

    “If going on a worker’s visa the fees can be expensive, such as about VND80 million [$3,400] for Taiwan. The travel route meanwhile only costs flight tickets and visa fees so many still choose to travel then escape to work, but they will face many risks,” he said.

    A Vietnamese migrant worker can make $1,000 to $1,200 a month in Japan and South Korea, four times the average monthly salary in Vietnam, which was VND6.5 million ($290) last year.

    A total of over 142,800 Vietnamese laborers went to work overseas in 2018, a six percent increase compared to the previous year.

    With this number, which includes about 50,300 female workers, 2018 became the fifth consecutive year in which the number of Vietnamese working overseas exceeded 100,000 people.

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  • SsangYong Motor rehires 60% of its workers

    SsangYong Motor rehires 60% of its workers

    SsangYong Motor said Monday that it has rehired 60 percent of workers who were sacked amid the carmaker’s restructuring efforts over a decade ago. The maker of the Rexton and Tivoli SUVs has been mired in protracted disputes with those who left the company against their will in 2009 after it was placed under court receivership. At that time, 900 workers who carried out a strike at the company’s main Pyeongtaek plant in Gyeonggi were ordered to choose between unpaid leave or voluntary retirement.

    Those who decided not to pick either option were later fired.

    In 2013, the 454 workers who had chosen unpaid leave were all reinstated, but the 165 fired workers were not permitted to return to work.

    After a series of negotiations in 2015, the company and its union agreed to gradually reinstate the fired workers, although some were left out of the agreement.

    In September 2018, the company and its union reached an agreement to rehire the remaining 119 fired workers by this year.

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  • WeWork signs deal to open office in Busan next year

    WeWork signs deal to open office in Busan next year

    WeWork, a global shared work space provider, said Tuesday it has signed an agreement with Busan to make inroads into the country’s second-largest city next year. The company signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the southeastern port city on Monday with a plan to open its first Busan branch in the Seomyeon area by the first half of next year, it said.

    WeWork said more locations, including in Centum City and Busan Station, will be launched down the road.

    “WeWork will contribute to creating jobs and global business opportunities as well as revitalizing the startup ecosystem in Busan,” Matthew Shampine, General Manager of WeWork Korea, said.

    Established in New York City in 2010, WeWork currently has over 300 offices in 23 countries, including 10 in Seoul. The first Korean WeWork office opened in 2016.

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  • Adidas’ slavery buster hopes technology can give workers a voice

    Adidas’ slavery buster hopes technology can give workers a voice

    As apparel and footwear industries rely heavily on outsourcing, sportswear companies have faced growing scrutiny. Adidas executive Aditi Wanchoo is on a mission – to wipe out any slavery in the German sportswear company’s supply chain, and she hopes giving workers the technology to speak out will help.

    With a background in corporate social responsibility at consultancy firm Accenture, Wanchoo was hired 18 months ago in a new position created by Adidas, one of the first companies to set up a role dedicated to fighting slavery.

    In recent years modern-day slavery has increasingly come under the spotlight, putting regulatory and consumer pressure on companies to ensure their supply chains are free of forced labour, child labor and other forms of slavery.

    As apparel and footwear industries rely heavily on outsourcing, sportswear companies have faced growing scrutiny.

    Wanchoo said Adidas had been actively working on this issue since it was revealed at the 1998 World Cup that footballs were produced by child laborers in India and companies realized they did not have control over their suppliers.

    Governments are now trying to tackle the problem with new legislation, such as the UK’s 2015 law requiring companies to disclose how they are ensuring supply chains are slavery free.

    “We have found that the UK Modern Slavery Act and recent legislative action in France and Australia have helped take the conversations to the boardroom,” Wanchoo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview this week in London.

    “My role was created to look at building relevant partnerships to continue our work on addressing potential modern slavery risks for our extended supply chain, i.e. our Tier 2 processing facilities and Tier 3 raw material sources.”

    Slavery has emerged as a major global problem with the Global Slavery Index by the Walk Free Foundation estimating there are nearly 46 million slaves in the world.

    The United Nations has a global goal to eradicate forced labor and slavery by 2030 and end all child labor by 2025.

    Wanchoo said she was tackling the issue in various ways such as collaborating with other companies, NGOs and governments, and training suppliers about the risks of bonded labor and the impact of recruitment fees on workers.

    Tech to give workers a voice

    She said Adidas was also on a major drive to encourage workers to speak up and use this information to eradicate slavery and improve workers’ conditions.

    The company already has “worker hotlines” giving 300,000 factory workers in China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia the opportunity to anonymously ask questions, make suggestions or express concerns via text messages and smart phone applications.

    But the company found this was not enough, and over the past year Adidas has run a pilot project in China with apps for workers to anonymously report issues – data that is collected and then analyzed.

    Wanchoo said the aim is to introduce such a system in all of the company’s 105 or so primary factories in the next five years and then look at cascading this down to second-tier suppliers.

    In Turkey these worker grievance systems had uncovered concerns about child labour and reports of illegal workers from Turkmenistan, while in Asia workers had complained about abuse by supervisors, wage issues and food, she said.

    She added that efforts to hear directly from workers was paying off. Last year campaign organisation KnowTheChain ranked Adidas top out of 20 firms, chosen because of their size, for its efforts to eliminate forced labor and human trafficking.

    “We want to make it as easy and anonymous as possible for workers,” said Hong Kong-based Wanchoo, whose official title is senior manager – development partnerships, social and environmental affairs at Adidas.

    She acknowledged this did not always go down well with suppliers who aim to keep costs as competitive as possible.

    “Sometimes there can be resistance from suppliers, but we work with them to demonstrate how this can help them in the long run by improving supply chain transparency, communication, productivity and worker retention,” she said.

  • Vietnam’s low-skilled labor force threatened by robots

    Vietnam’s low-skilled labor force threatened by robots

    86 percent of garment workers could lose their jobs in the coming decades, according to the International Labor Organization. Vietnam’s workforce is made up largely of untrained and low-skilled workers who are at high risk of being replaced by automation and robots in the near future, labor experts said at a conference in Hanoi on Tuesday.

    Dao Hong Lan, vice minister of labor, said Vietnam currently has 54.36 million workers but nearly 80 percent of them have not received any training or degrees for their jobs.

    The country’s labor force is expected to grow to 62 million in 2025, posing a very difficult task for the country to create more than 700,000 thousand jobs every year.

    “Globalization and technological revolution are posing increasingly greater challenges for Vietnam’s economy,” Lan said.

    Skill enhancement must be a priority to secure Vietnam’s labor market ahead of the time when low-cost labor will no longer be competitive, officials said at the National Policy Dialogue on Future of Work held by the labor ministry and the International Labor Organization (ILO).

    David Lamotte, ILO deputy director for Asia and the Pacific, said: “It will certainly shift in the coming years as technology costs decline while labor costs increase.”

    A recent ILO study found that workers in Vietnam’s two major and growing production sectors – garments and electronics – are at risk.

    In the garments sector, 86 percent of workers face increased automation, while about 75 percent of workers in the electronics sector could be replaced by robots in the coming decades, it found.

    The sectors provide the country’s key exports and account for around 40 percent of the nation’s manufacturing jobs, but productivity and the application of technology in the workplace are much lower than in other Southeast Asian countries.

    Productivity in Vietnam’s garments sector, for example, is only 20 percent of Thailand’s and nearly the same as Cambodia.

    Garment production in Vietnam currently relies on a large number of workers rather than highly-skilled employees while the electronics sector targets low-value production and low-skilled assembly work, according to the ILO.

    The ILO said young people in Vietnam should pursue courses in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to meet employment demands in the age of technology.

    “This is important, particularly among girls and young women who are more susceptible to job loss than men, when automation becomes more popular in manufacturing industries,” said Lamotte.

    A recent survey by the Institute of Labor Sciences and Social Affairs at the ministry also named creativity, foreign languages, teamwork and problem solving as the core competencies needed to survive the modern workplace.

    Both the ILO and the institute called for better connections between Vietnam’s policymakers, employers and training institutions to adapt to the changing workplace and technological innovations.

    The current link between businesses and training institutes mainly comes in the form of internships while their cooperation remains weak when it comes to training and planning for skilled workers.

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  • Starbucks Vietnam And The Asia Foundation To Prepare Disadvantaged People to Work

    Starbucks Vietnam And The Asia Foundation To Prepare Disadvantaged People to Work

    Starbucks Vietnam and The Asia Foundation, a nonprofit international development organization, today announced a one-year vocational training program in Hanoi to prepare young people from disadvantaged backgrounds for careers in Vietnam’s fast-growing food and beverage industry. The Starbucks Vocational Training program will engage 50 youth between the ages of 18 and 24, including those who have been affected by family violence, human trafficking, and poverty, in a training program where they will acquire the professional and life skills required to succeed in the retail sector.

    As part of the program, youth will receive both classroom instruction focused on subjects such as customer service, English language learning, financial literacy, and work readiness, as well as on-the-job training. Starbucks partners (employees) will actively engage in the program, providing seminars and in store experience. Upon completion of the program, youth will receive six months of follow-up assistance to help them secure full-time employment.

    “Being an active part of the communities we serve in is intrinsic to who we are as a company,” said Mark Ring, president of Starbucks Asia Pacific. “As Starbucks continues to grow in Vietnam and across Asia, so too does our aspiration to build a different kind of company – one committed to performance that is driven through the lens of humanity – and being a positive force in building the future success of young people.”

    “We are proud to partner with The Asia Foundation and REACH to provide lifelong experiences and skills for disadvantaged young people,” said Patricia Marques, general manager for Starbucks Vietnam.

    “Youth in Vietnam represent a huge pool of talent for this dynamic country, but at the same time there are also challenges for many young people to gain access to work. We have created this project to build confidence, self-esteem and training, which will help them to succeed in the economy.”

    Figures from the General Statistics Office in 2015 indicate that the unemployment rate among youth is more than triple the overall unemployment rate, standing at 6.75%. While well-educated workers are able to access expanding opportunities in the private sector, for less educated workers, and particularly those from rural areas, it is much more challenging due to their lack of education, skills and business connections. This leaves them with fewer options and makes them more vulnerable to exploitation.

    “The gap between supply and demand in Vietnam’s fast-growing industries is an opportunity to provide disadvantaged youth with market-driven, practical vocational training. And by providing employers with skilled young people, we are proud to partner with Starbucks Vietnam to contribute to the development of a workforce that can help to meet the demands of Vietnam’s rapidly changing economy, while empowering some of the country’s most disadvantaged communities,” said Dinh Thi Kieu Nhung, The Asia Foundation’s project manager.

    Starbucks Vietnam and The Asia Foundation will implement this program in partnership with REACH, a local non-governmental organization specializing in providing vocational training, career advice, and job placement to some of Vietnam’s most disadvantaged youth. Funding for the project is supported by The Starbucks Foundation.