Future Bleak for Viet Overseas Workers

The revolution in Eastern Europe has transformed the 180,000 Vietnamese working there from fraternal socialist guests to economic liabilities.

Authorities in the Soviet Union and its former satellites have exposed state enterprises to cost accounting and Western competition, which has meant layoffs.

Most Vietnamese contract workers employed under decade-old “labor cooperation” agreements will be repatriated in the next few years.

Their return is expected to exacerbate the unemployment problem in Vietnam, which recently demobilized tens of thousands of soldiers who had served in Cambodia and on the Chinese border.

Thousands of other people lost their jobs after Vietnam streamlined its own state companies with reforms similar to those in Eastern Europe.

Returning workers, diplomats and press reports say people vying for jobs and basic goods in Eastern Europe have protested the presence of the Vietnamese, sometimes with violence.

“The Soviets look down on the Vietnamese people and sometimes the bad ones even attack us,” said Nguyen Ngoc Vy, 30, who returned recently from Moscow. “I was afraid of being attacked and killed by the Soviet hooligans.”

Vy said fear was one reason he came home two years before the end of his contract at an automobile plant. He and other Vietnamese went abroad in hope of earning more money and buying consumer goods, but found the shelves empty in Moscow stores.

Vietnam stopped sending workers abroad in January, after talks with host countries, said Tran Luc, head of the Labor Ministry’s international relations department.

East Germany, which has about 60,000 Vietnamese workers, and Czechoslovakia, with about 14,000, have said all will be gone by 1994-95, when their contracts expire. Bulgaria says all 24,000 of its Vietnamese will be gone by 1992, before their contracts expire.

The Soviet Union, which has about 81,000 Vietnamese, will continue its program for now but probably will reduce the number greatly, said Anatoly Voronine of the Soviet Embassy. He said the Soviets need workers in certain regions and industries, and to produce more consumer goods.

Vietnamese who work abroad have contracts of four to six years, generally for jobs in light industry or building construction. Part of each salary goes to repay Vietnam’s large debts to the host countries.

The labor pacts were signed in 1980 and 1981.

“Originally this was not conceived as a purely economic transaction, but . . . chiefly as an act of cooperation in the fraternal and friendly spirit among socialist countries,” Labor Minister Tran Dinh Hoan said recently.

Ideological bonds have loosened or disappeared, however, and economic considerations now dominate.

In Czechoslovakia, “skinheads and punks” taking advantage of the freer atmosphere have attacked and injured Vietnamese, said Josef Hanculak, charge d’affaires of the Czechoslovak Embassy. To protect the Vietnamese, he said, factories had to provide buses to take them to and from work.

Vietnamese in Bulgaria have been “manhandled by hooligans on whom the Bulgarian police turn a blind eye,” a correspondent of Hanoi radio reported after a visit in April. In one housing complex, he said, about 700 Vietnamese lived for years without electricity or running water.

The radio quoted a Soviet government official, Viktor Buynovsky, as saying: “Five years ago, if a Vietnamese worker was seen carrying large quantities of pans or electric irons, Soviets would laugh. But now, when everything is scarce, this irks our people.”

Vietnam has put blame on some of the workers. Last year, the radio said, authorities disciplined 20% of “labor management cadres” who worked abroad and were involved in “negative phenomena.”

Reports from Eastern Europe say some Vietnamese have formed groups to engage in black market dealings, currency speculation and prostitution.