VietNamNet Bridge – The reports by relevant ministries and branches all showed that more jobs have been created and the unemployment rate has decreased in the context of the ailing national economy.
Dr. Nguyen Ba Ngoc, Deputy Head of the Institute for Labor Science and Social Affairs, commented at the recent workshop on the implementation of the national sustainable job program in 2012-2016, that the reports on labor and job do not truly reflect the situation of the market which has a close relation with the health of the national economy.
Inaccurate statistics
Ngoc said that state management agencies have not been well aware of the labor movement in the current conditions, when a series of businesses get dissolved or stop operation.
A report showed that 21,750 businesses in HCM City followed the procedures to stop their business in 2012, which did not include the businesses which halted their operation.
However, the number of workers getting jobs in the city did not reduce sharply as expected (289,400 in 2012 vs. 292,000 in 2011). In the first nine months of 2013, the city created 216,183 jobs, an increase of 6,681 jobs in comparison with the same period of 2012.
As such, despite the existing big difficulties of the national economy, HCM City always fulfill its task of generating jobs with the numbers of newly created jobs hovering around some familiar figures.
The reports pointed out that the unemployment rate has been decreasing year after year, from 5.1 percent in 2010 to 5 percent in 2011 and 4.9 percent in 2012. In the first nine months of 2013, the number of workers registering their unemployment status continuously decreased by 12.5 percent from that in the same period of 2012.
According to Le Van Thanh, MA, from the HCM City Development Research Institute, HCM City receives some 40,000 immigrant workers every year, while only a certain proportion of them have jobs in the official employment sector.
Thanh believes that the number of unemployed workers is much even higher than the reported number, if counting on the laborers in the unofficial employment sector.
“Unstable jobs” or “jobless”?
The Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) has reported to the National Assembly that the unemployment rate is 2 percent.
However, Nguyen Van Hien, a National Assembly’s Deputy from Ba Ria – Vung Tau province, pointed out that the figure is unreliable. He also expressed his worry that it is very difficult for policy makers to lay down reasonable policies if they cannot have reliable reports.
Bui Sy Loi, Deputy Chair of the National Assembly’s Committee for Social Affairs, also said he can see problems in the statistics about wages, newly created jobs, unemployment rate.
“No one can believe that more jobs have been created and the unemployment rate has decreased in the context of the decrease of GDP and the increase of the number of dissolved businesses,” he commented.
Explaining the figure, Deputy Minister of MOLISA Nguyen Thanh Hoa said only the people who worked under the labor contracts and then lost the jobs have been referred to as “redundant.” The workers in the unofficial sector, the ones in craft villages and those who provide services have remained unhurt in the economic downturn.
He said that as the national economy has recovered step by step, the labor market has warmed up.
Kim Chi