Date: 23 January 2014

Type: News

Source:FIS.com

Keywords: Labor, unions, strike

Nearly 300 workers of two processing plants located in Tra Noc Industrial Zone, in the Mekong Delta are on strike asking for Tet (Lunar New Year) bonuses and seniority allowances.

The strike started on January 21 at Phuong Dong Seafood Limited Company, installed to the south of Can Tho city, which specializes in processing frozen tra for export.

Two hundred employees of Thien Ma Seafood Processing Co. joined the move.

Tran Nhat Phuong, Business Manager of Phuong Dong Company explained, “The company has faced many difficulties, so this year we offered the 1.4-month salary as Tet bonus. We will provide seniority allowance this year if the company does better,” Dtinews reported.

However, workers said that in early 2013, their bosses promised to grant seniority awards at the year’s end. However, a few days ago, they said that only Tet bonuses would be granted.

The Ministry of Labour, War Invalids and Social Affairs (Molisa) explained that in the current big economic difficulties, businesses would have to fasten their belt and reserve limited budgets for Tet bonus for workers.

According Pham Van Thanh, a senior official of Molisa, many workers would get neither salaries nor Tet bonuses as their enterprises have been dissolved or stopped operation. In Hanoi alone, 12,000 businesses out of the 140,000 businesses in the city have stopped operation, leaving thousands of workers on their own, VietNamNet Bridge informed.

Mai Duc Chinh, Deputy Chair of the Vietnam Labour Union, has denied the fact that the minimum wage increase, to be valid from 1 January 2014, would affect the enterprises’ pay fund, saying that in reality, a lot of enterprises pay higher than the minimum levels.###