Vietnamese workers ready to board a flight to Japan to work. VNA/VNS Photo

HÀ NỘI — More than 1.5 million domestic jobs were created in 2019, while 147,000 people were sent to work overseas, the labour ministry reported on Wednesday.

In a year-end review conference by the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, deputy minister Lê Tấn Dũng said that a total of over 1.65 million Vietnamese were employed this year, slightly surpassing the initial target by 3.5 per cent.

Such achievements came following a series of actions and plans carried out by the ministry to develop the labour market, forecast demand and play an intermediary role to connect supply and demand in the market, Dũng said.

“The ministry has carried out a range of programmes, projects and policies on employment aid for workers, especially young adults, people with disabilities, rural and migrant workers, women and those of ethnic minorities,” he said.

The ministry also tried to improve the performance of job centres while opening various job exchanges and job fairs more regularly, according to the deputy minister.

Regarding efforts to expand the overseas labour market, Dũng reported that the ministry successfully explored a number of new and potential markets in Europe in 2019.

It also identified the underdeveloped southwestern region to be a new source of labour supply, offering more training to local workers there who were then able to sign work contracts with partners abroad, he added.

“We’ve managed to send more than 147,000 labourers to work overseas under contracts (in 2019). In total, we’ve sent more than 550,000 workers abroad over the last four years.”

Such fruitful outcomes, however, could not entirely lift the increasing pressure to create more sustainable jobs for the young generation and especially those in the countryside, the deputy official admitted.

One of the biggest issues was a weak network of vocational training facilities which failed to meet the demand of the labour market and the needs of socio-economic development of the localities, Dũng said.

Another rampant problem was employees working overseas who dropped their contracts and illegally stayed in the foreign country, which consequently diminished efforts to export more workers, he said.

‘Take better care’

Speaking at the conference, National Assembly (NA) chairwoman Nguyễn Thị Kim Ngân praised the ministry for achieving all key targets, one of which was to amend the important Law on Labour and had it pass through the NA.

While asking the ministry to keep rolling out programmes to increase the quality of vocational training, Ngân also demanded it to start assessing and reviewing the prevailing social security policies in 2020. Those which are deemed no longer appropriate should be changed for new ones, she said.

“We have to realise policies towards those with war merits. We have to take better care of them,” the chairwoman said.

“We have to raise the living standards of ethnic minority folks and those living in remote areas even higher”. — VNS