Director of the MoLISA’s Department of Overseas Labour Tong Hai Nam said that Vietnam now has 506 companies licensed to bring labourers to work abroad and over 26,000 guest works who cannot return home despite their expired work contracts due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The department has directed relevant units to keep a close watch on the pandemic's developments, and actively coordinate with Vietnam’s representative agencies abroad and partners and employers using labourers to ensure safety and legitimate interests of Vietnamese workers while waiting to come back home.

It has also asked businesses to calculate the number of workers who need to be repatriated to report to authorised agencies for consideration of organising flights to repatriating them as soon as possible and in accordance with the country’s conditions, said Nam.

According to the official, the department re-signed an agreement on labour cooperation with Thailand; has negotiated another deal with Israel; and been implementing the agreements signed with the Republic of Korea (RoK) and Japan.

 

It has also made market research and assessed the pilot phase of bringing workers to work in some European countries such as Romania and Poland to promote the development, expansion and stabilisation of the labour market, and intensified support for localities in continuing to pilot sending seasonal workers to the RoK.

Last year, due to movement restrictions applied by many countries over the world, the number of Vietnamese labourers going abroad to work was only 78,641, equivalent to only 60.5 percent of the plan assigned by the Government./.