Asia’s factory workers at the sharp end of the west’s supply chain crisis
Migrant workers ate and slept in factories swarming with Covid, sealed off from outside world
Rebecca Ratcliffe and Nhung Nguyen in Saigon
Thu 23 Dec 2021 05.00 GMT
For weeks, Hoang Thi Quynh* worked and slept inside a garment factory in Tien Giang province, in southern Vietnam. She would start her shift at 7.15am and then, after a day spent sewing sportswear garments, enter an empty hall of the factory complex and settle down for the night.

Each worker had a tent, set one or two metres apart, containing a foil mat, pillow, blanket and a box to store their belongings. No workers were permitted to meet anyone from outside the factory; even speaking to a visitor over the gates was forbidden.

A Covid wave that spread across the industrial areas of Vietnam earlier this year placed intense pressure on the country’s manufacturing sector – just as factories were churning out products destined for shops ahead of Christmas.

Vietnam is one of Asia’s key manufacturing hubs and produces goods for some of the biggest Western brands in tech, garments and sportswear. News reports about the outbreak warned of delays in the delivery of iPhone 13s, and disruption in the supply of everything from Toyota cars to Ikea curtains.

“Vietnam probably does a third of all apparel production [for the US],” said Jana Gold, a Senior Director with Alvarez & Marsal Consumer and Retail Group in Washington. “Of all countries to get hit with Covid, it really impacted the industry,” she said.

Many factories asked workers to stay on site to comply with government rules designed to minimise infections – a policy that has since been dropped, including by Quynh’s workplace, which allowed her to commute from home again by November.

But production still has not returned to normal; analysts predict it won’t do so until the end of the first quarter of 2022. In the run up to Christmas, retailers scrambled to prioritise which products were most needed by shops. Some continued shipping as late as mid-November, and even chartered planes to get garments to high streets on time.

The real crisis, though, has been felt by the workers – many of them internal migrants – who power the country’s factories.

In July, when Covid cases escalated, a severe lockdown was imposed across industrial areas, banning people from leaving their homes, even to buy food. Hundreds of thousands of workers moved into factories through an arrangement known as “three-on-site”, where workers sleep, work and eat in their factory. By October, roughly 300,000 workers were doing so in Binh Duong province alone.

For workers whose factories closed down during lockdown, there was no alternative but to stay in their rental rooms, in limbo. They were unable to earn a living, yet prevented from returning home to their families. Workers had little available cash to cope with the ordeal, said Nguyen Phuong Tu, visiting research fellow at Adelaide University who specialises in factory workers’ labour rights. “Most will try to remit savings back to their family members in their hometown, so the savings they have for themselves are not really much,” she said. Though some government support was available, it was nowhere near enough.

When movement restrictions were lifted at the beginning of October, many workers decided they had enough, and left industrial areas en masse. Motorbikes, strapped with plastic bags bursting with belongings, flooded the streets. As many as 90,000 fled Ho Chi Minh City for their home provinces on the first weekend alone, according to state media.

Tran Thi Lan* was one of a reported 300,000 people who left Binh Duong, part of the garment manufacturing hub in the south. Her area was at the centre of a Covid outbreak, and she spent four months in lockdown. Eventually, she caught Covid herself. “I knew that it would be my turn to get infected. Every two weeks people got tested and the infected rooms got closer,” she said, shortly after she returned home.

Normally she earns a basic monthly salary of about VND4.8m (154.56 GBP), making trainers. She would get an additional VND20,000 (64p) per hour of overtime and VND300,000 (9.66 GBP) more as a food stipend. It wasn’t much, she said, considering how exhausting the work was. Her company, which suspended operations during the lockdown, gave her no support, she said.
Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... ain-crisis