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Hard hours and low pay – a worker’s long day in IZ
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‘As dull as our daily gruel’

VietNamNet Bridge – Hard work, cheap food, no social life, dreams of escape – the life of the women workers of Vietnam’s industrial zones unfolds in two places only: their rented rooms and their workshops.

Part II of VietNamNet’s investigation of the lives of workers in the export factories.


When beatings won’t make the TV work

There’s nothing glamorous about the lives of the young women who work on the assembly lines of thousands of Vietnamese factories. When VietNamNet’s reporters spent ten days ‘under cover’ working in an industrial zone (IZ) near HCM City, almost all the workers they met did little but shuttle between factory and boarding house.

Every afternoon, millions of workers leave the IZ’s on bicycles or by foot. “A motorbike is a luxury for a poor workers like me,” said Hoa, who works in the Amata IZ near Bien Hoa City. “Sometimes we talk about going somewhere, but we have only bicycles, mostly real clunkers. Some girls even don’t have a bicycle. So usually we end up hanging out in our rented rooms not far from the factory.”

In Hoa’s room, the most expensive object is a small TV set that’s seen better years. “You have to beat it to force it to work,” she said with a grin.

But sometimes the TV set won’t turn on even though “beaten” hard. Then all the roommates troop to a nearby room to watch TV. However, there’s a problem, explained Hoa’s friend Hien. “They [in the other room] are newly-married, so it feels weird to watch their TV. At such moments, I miss my TV set at home so much.”

Many workers, though they’ve been in HCM City for two years, hardly ever leave their rooms except to go to the workplace. Day by day, their spirits atrophy. The young women of the factory zones rarely – perhaps never -- enjoy an evening of fun or a day of sightseeing. Once a year, they go for a holiday visit to their country village, bearing gifts if they can. The rest of the time is spent on the job. If they aren’t working overtime and the TV won’t work, their only amusement is chatting with roommates or an early bedtime.

Earning a tiny wage and thinking all the time that they need to send money home, the workers eat very simply. Their meals are just rice and vegetables. For many workers, breakfast the next day is a little rice left over from dinner, fried with a bit of garlic salt.

“That’s our life! Totally boring!” Hoa said. Now and then, to ‘change the atmosphere,’ Hoa and her roommates imagine a dream dinner. “While we are eating vegetables, we pretend that we are eating a chicken leg, or pork or fish. It actually makes us all feel better!”



More dreams

The women workers of the industrial zones don’t just dream about “imaginary meals”.

Trang, another Amata IZ worker, had to drop out of school when she was a ninth grader because her family is very poor. At 15, she left her home in far off Quang Ngai for HCM City, hoping to find a job. Still too young for factory work, Trang said, she sold buns and sweets, helped out in stores, did housework – “any job that was honest and paid money.”

“The first big sum I earned was 700,000 dong. I sent 600,000 to my grandma and two sisters,” Trang said. “In a lot of my “helper” jobs, I got to eat for free, so I had some money left over.”

As she struggled to earn a living and support her family, Trang’s dream of going back to school did not die. Now 18, Trang is old enough to work in an IZ. She works all day and studies at night, dreaming that one day she can change her life.

Trang is not unusual. Many of the IZ workers in industrial zones study in their spare time, hoping to escape from the “worker’s life.” They confide that the drudgery of the production line has helped them to understand that “only by study can [they] change their lives and escape from poverty”.

“One year living as a worker helps me understand the cost of not having a degree. I weep for the time I wasted before,” said Thuy, a worker at the Linh Trung Export Processing Zone.

But if these young women are asked to choose between quitting their job or quitting studying, they agree that’s an impossible choice. They must have their job to live but they cannot quit studying because education is the only way to rise . So they choose both.

Thai Phuong