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Increasing wages or losing staff?
Businesses complain that they are seriously lacking laborers to keep normal production. However, they do not want to increase wages to retain workers, because they have to cut down expenses in the current difficult period.
The decision to leave the company of four officers, two accountancy officers, a business division head and a business officer, has caused a serious headache to the director of a digital technology company in Hanoi.
According to Saigon Tiep Thi, the two accountants were enjoying the monthly income of 4.5 million dong, while the head of the business division and the business officer earned 10-12 million dong and 7-8 million dong a month (5 million and 3.5 million dong in fixed salaries plus the additional income depending on the turnover).
Reasoning the high inflation rate, the two accountants asked for wage increases to 6-6.5 million dong a month, while the business officers wanted 8 and 5 million dong in fixed salaries.
The wage increase proposals put hard pressures on the company’s managers. They tried to negotiate with the four officers about the wage levels which they thought would be bearable for the company and reasonable for workers. However, as the negotiations failed, the managers had to accept the resignations of the officers.
After one month of looking for new officers, the company has found two accountants, while it still cannot find suitable candidates for the business division.
A garment company in Duc Giang Town in Hanoi reportedly had to refuse many orders last month, because it does not have enough workers to fulfill orders. The group of most skilful workers proposed the company’s board of management to increase the unit processing price from 37,000 dong to 57,000 dong per shirt. However, as the board of management failed to negotiate the wages, the workers have left the company.
Saigon Tiep Thi has quoted the director of the company as saying that he understands well that it is the legitimate behavior of workers to ask for wage increases in the context of high inflation. “However, we have to consider the proposal thoroughly. If the expenses increase unreasonably, the company will not be able to stand firmly; then workers will become jobless,” he said.
The enterprises in industrial zones prove to be the ones which suffer most from the labor shortage, especially trained workers. Thoi bao Kinh te Saigon has quoted Nguyen Tan Dinh, Deputy Head of the HCM City Industrial Zone (IZ) and Export Processing Zone (EPZ) Management Board (HEPZA) as saying “that 252,500 workers are working at 1034 enterprises in the 14 IZ and EPZ of the city.” However, 50 percent of the workers only finish primary and secondary schools.
The low qualification of the workers in IZ and EPZ in HCM City shows that the enterprises in the zones mostly operate in the fields which use many workers and backward technologies and only need unskilled workers.
Enterprises in IZ and EPZ are now facing serious shortage of blue-collar workers. In the last many years, workers from different provinces flocked to HCM City to work in IZ and EPZ. However, since the provinces now also have industrial factories themselves, the workers now tend to return to their home villages to seek jobs, which allow them to live near their houses and save the accommodation expenses.
The low income of workers has also been cited as a reason which has caused the labor shortage. Workers leave companies for others to seek higher incomes. Especially, they would leave even when they can seek the incomes just higher by several hundreds of thousands of dong.
However, Nguyen Xuan Thuy, Head of the General Division of MTEX Vietnam in Tan Thuan EPZ, said that it is very difficult for enterprises to increase wages at this moment, because the money enterprises get from doing the outsourcing for foreign partners has been decreasing.
Meanwhile, businesses have been warned that if they cannot offer reasonable pay, they will not be able to recruit skilled workers and retain them.
vietnamnet
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