Naturally inclined to turn towards the United States, Quebec companies sometimes look much further afield, including as far as Vietnam. Fifth article in a series of five.
Victim of its frenzied development in recent years, Vietnam is, in turn, beginning to wonder how it will find and retain the necessary workforce in certain sectors.
It’s a story that’s starting to circulate in business circles. Known for their abundant and cheap labor, Asian countries are finding it increasingly difficult to find the workers needed for their manufacturing sectors, reported last summer the Wall Street Journal. It is not only about China, where this phenomenon has already been mentioned for some time, but also other countries in the region, including Vietnam, to which companies had just started to go to remedy, among other things , to the problem.
It’s not just that wages are no longer high enough for workers’ tastes, the American daily reported. It is also that today’s young people aspire to a career other than that of factory employees, that they would prefer to work behind a computer in an office.
According to the International Labor Organization, the normal working hours of a Vietnamese employee in the manufacturing sector in 2022 was just over 47 hours per week, usually spread over six days, for an average salary of US$321 per month (CA$434, or a little over CA$5,200 per year). This was four times more than 15 years earlier.
Worker in Vietnam
“Our salaries certainly do not compare to those offered in Canada or even in China, but in Vietnam, they ensure a good quality of life for our employees,” declares a manager of VPIC (for Vietnam Precision Industrial Joint Stock Company ), a company created in Vietnam by Taiwanese capital.
Although he says he has no problems recruiting or retaining staff, he has noticed a change in attitude recently. “All generations want to be of their time. Today, more and more young people are well educated, graduating from universities and perhaps looking more for office jobs and a more comfortable life. But Vietnam has a lot of young people and some of them are happy to have manual jobs. »
With 185 employees in Vietnam spread across two factories, including one in Binh Duong, 40 km north of Ho Chi Minh City in the south of the country, Emballage St-Jean, a manufacturer of bread bags and other food packaging Quebec plastic, also has no problems recruiting labor, affirms in turn the vice-president and head of operations of the Quebec company, Mathieu Jeanneau. “Our turnover rate is very low there. It must be said that salaries there have increased by 8 to 10% per year since we arrived and we have the well-being of our employees at heart. »
Made up almost equally of men and women, the employees of the Binh Duong factory often come from all over the country and were attracted by the promises of good jobs held out by the rapid development of the manufacturing sector in the South. , explains the general director of Emballage St-Jean for Vietnam, Elizabeth Nguyen. Some have very young children whom they have left in the care of their parents in their region of origin, at least until they are old enough to go to school.
In one corner of the factory, there are still mattresses and furniture that were used when the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown rules forced the company to ask volunteers to take up residence in their workplace .
Made up of a majority of women, the office staff not only takes care of company affairs in Vietnam. We also transferred the equivalent of around fifteen jobs for clerical tasks for which we had difficulty finding the necessary labor in Quebec.
A summer in Quebec
On the eve of the launch of its production activities in Vietnam in the summer of 2016, Emballage St-Jean brought a handful of Vietnamese workers to its Pointe-aux-Trembles plant in Montreal for two months for familiarize yourself with the company’s machines, practices and standards.
Étienne Deguire, 48 years old, production director at the factory, and Veronica Vazquez, 46 years old, trainer, remember it very well. He was then a trainer, she was an operator. And they were both part of the welcoming team. “We remained Facebook friends,” says Étienne.
About ten years earlier, the company had also asked its Quebec employees to help it train workers for a new factory it had just opened in China. The argument at the time, as today, was that the best way to ensure the success of the company and the sustainability of its jobs in Quebec was to succeed in combining mass production in low-cost countries and more flexible and rapid production in Quebec.
“As the experience with China had shown this to be true, the Vietnamese workers were very well received,” says Étienne Deguire. Curiosity was quickly replaced by friendliness. They already had technical skills; Most importantly, they needed to learn our processes and standards. As only one of them spoke English and we weren’t used to the accent, it wasn’t always easy. »
On their days off, employees invited their Asian colleagues to eat at restaurants, go out downtown and visit the casino, Veronica says. “Everything seemed different to them and many things surprised them, starting with the size of the people. »
14,000 kilometers away, three other Emballage St-Jean workers also remember. “What surprised me the most was how late the sun set in the evening,” says Thang Tran, now 37, who supervises bag making in Binh Duong.
“I didn’t feel any hostility. We were welcomed with kindness and with the desire to help us learn and help us discover Quebec,” says his 41-year-old colleague and head of maintenance, Ngoc Thanh Tran.
The hardest part, without a doubt, was the food. “We got tired, at one point, of apple juice in the morning, pizza and donuts,” recalls Nam Nguyen, 38, head of quality control and safety and the group’s interpreter. We asked permission from our hotel owner to use a small electric stove to cook things, like rice. »
Same, not the same
We cannot fail to be struck by the similarity between their two factories. Same smell of solvent and plastic that slightly stings the nose when you enter. Same health safety devices to access the production floor. Same calm and same concentration of workers around the machines that form, print, cut and package the bags.
If there is one place where Emballage St-Jean is struggling with a labor shortage, it is less at its Binh Duong plant than at that of Pointe-aux-Trembles. Mexican of origin, Veronica is notably responsible for the training of around fifty recently hired workers from Latin America. The company hopes soon to also find new recruits in Morocco. “They are valiant people and that is the fun to work with them,” says Étienne about these colleagues from elsewhere.
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat-International Journalism Fund.The duty.