In order to restore the labor market in a state of "safe adaptation, flexibility, and effective control of the Covid-19 pandemic", the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs has just issued a program to support labor market recovery and development. Accordingly, the goal is to maintain the unemployment rate in urban areas below 4%, the underemployment rate in rural areas below 2%; to support employees working in enterprises in key economic regions, localities with economic zones, industrial parks, and high-tech zones to feel secure to work, to attract workers to return to work.

Accordingly, the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs will coordinate with the Ministry of Finance and the State Bank of Vietnam to implement the policy of reducing interest rates and supplementing capital sources to support employees to borrow capital from the National Fund for employment. Self-employment creates jobs for themselves and other employees.

At the same time, businesses are encouraged to have policies to support employees in terms of salary, meal allowance, insurance and other social welfare regimes to retain employees; implement support measures to attract foreigners to work in localities with economic zones, industrial parks, export processing zones and high-tech zones.

In addition, the program also clearly states the support to attract foreign workers to work in localities with economic zones, industrial parks, export processing zones and high-tech zones. Specifically, there is a policy to support foreign workers with minimum living expenses, travel and medical expenses; support additional expenses for employees who are raising small children and pregnant women. There is a plan to support temporary accommodation arrangement or direct cash support for foreign workers to rent a house when they come to work to stabilize their lives and create motivation to participate in production and business recovery.

Employers are supported with labor recruitment costs through the Employment Service Center; encouraging businesses to provide employment services in the area to reduce consulting and labor supply costs. Besides, there will be policies to reduce interest rates, add more capital to the National Employment Fund to loans to households to recover, develop production and business, and create jobs for employees.

The commercial and service sectors in Ho Chi Minh City are in high demand for labor. Photo T.D

According to Dr. Truong Anh Dung, Director General of the General Department of Vocational Education (Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs), in order to restore the labor market, developing skilled human resources is still an important task of the very important pillars, besides the speed of vaccine coverage.

“In the short term, it is necessary to promote vocational skills training for employees, this need to last for at least 1 to 2 years in the support policy from the Unemployment Insurance Fund. Because, although this is a timely policy, in the context of the pandemic, when most businesses return to production, they have a shortage of labor, so it is necessary to focus on production. Training time is very limited. At the same time, it is necessary to add more policies and resources to order short-term skills training for pupils, students and employees who are not subject to training by the Unemployment Insurance Fund,” Dung said.

These policies will attract a large workforce of laborers to return to their hometowns due to unemployment, job loss, and retraining so that they can return to industrial zones and big cities that are short of human resources in the shortest time.

The policy also helps to meet the increasing recruitment of skilled workers, to receive new waves of FDI moving into Vietnam, as well as the shift of technologies.

In the medium and long term, Dung said that it is necessary to develop an open, flexible and modern vocational education system, in which it is necessary to focus on and improve the quality of short-, medium- and long-term forecasting of human resource demand, employment and training demand in each industry or profession. This will be a fundamental solution to build a long-term training strategy in this field.