HANOI - Unemployment problems are an urgent task for Vietnam's ruling Communist
Party, a top official said on May 9.
"Solving the jobs problem is
central to ensuring safety and social justice in development, and is a central
question in getting out of crisis," Vu Oanh, a member of the party's top body,
the politburo, wrote in an article in the party newspaper Nhan Dan.
Oanh,
who ranks sixth in the politburo and is in charge of "mass mobilization", said
Vietnam's work force of 31.4 million people increases by more than a million
people, or 3.5 percent, every year.
Ten percent of city-dwellers and 2.2
million Vietnamese overall are unemployed, Oanh said. Most of the unemployed are
young and 85 percent unskilled.
His figures indicate an unemployment rate
of 7 percent of the work force - much lower than some official counts of 12
percent or more.-Reuters
third of rural families are poor, he
added.
Millions of unemployed peasants flock into big cities like Hanoi
and Ho Chi Minh City seeking work when they are not engaged in harvesting rice
and other crops. Many end up as casual laborers.
Unemployment is a source
of prostitution, drug addiction and crime, Oanh said.
He said the problem
could not resolved by old-style socialist bureaucratic centralization, or a
Western-style headlong rush abandoning social justice.
"Our country is
now just starting up economically, has little capital and a low technological
base," he said. "But we are rich in labor. So the strategy for solving the jobs
issue must consist of steps to improve economic growth while ensuring social
justice."
Authorities had to develop agriculture, farm industries, light
industry and handicrafts, he said.
Among other solutions many workers are
being sent abroad, mainly to the Middle East and other Asian countries. About
2,000 are going to Libya this year.
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