Nguyen Thi Hang, Minister of the Labour, War Invalid and Social Affairs, talked about the salary mechanism restructuring.

Some people said that it is necessary for Vietnam to set up a common playing field for salary mechanism, when Vietnam joins WTO. How do you comment about this?

The salary mechanism in the production sector has shown several shortcomings.

First, the minimum wage is too low, not high enough to reproduce popular workers, which is 30-40% lower than the levels in regional countries.
Second, the wage paid by enterprises, especially state owned enterprises, do not reflect the actual value and the prices in the labour market.

Third, the salary mechanism applied by state owned enterprise is not reasonable, which does not help encourage skilful labourers.

And fourth, there exist many salary mechanisms on the labour market with the differences in state owned, foreign invested and private enterprises.

It is necessary now to change our way of thinking in defining salary policies. The salary policies, on one hand, must follow the principles of the market economy, on the other hand, ensuring the justice in the society. There must not be the discriminatory treatment in salary policies in different kinds of businesses.

How can we remove the discriminatory treatment in salary policies?

The State will set a common ground for the minimum salary for all kinds of businesses. The State will just supervise the implementation of the salary policies, while not deeply intervening in the production and business operation of enterprises. Enterprises must have the right to decide the salary levels after considering the production and business efficiency.

Can you give more details about the salary policy reform?

The urgent thing that must be done first is to set up the salary policies for three sectors, the administrative organs (fed by the state budget); the administrative organs that provide public services (the salary for the sector is sourced partially from the state budget and from public services); and businesses (businesses will have the right to decide the salary levels in negotiations with employees).

It is also an urgent task to draw the roadmap for setting up a policy on minimum salary commonly applied for all kinds of businesses. The policy will be applied as of 2010.

Source: TBKTVN