HCMC – The Covid-19 pandemic left 1.3 million Vietnamese people unemployed in 2020, said the Department of Population and Labor Statistics under the General Statistics Office (GSO) at a press briefing in Hanoi on January 6 on the labor market in the last quarter of last year and the whole year.
Vu Thi Thu Thuy, head of the department, said the number of jobless people is the highest in a decade, Tuoi Tre Online newspaper reported.
Thanks to the economic recovery in the fourth quarter of 2020, the labor market also showed some positive signs.
However, the number of laborers and jobs and laborers’ incomes still fell in the final quarter of 2020 and the whole year.
In the last quarter of 2020, some 1.2 million people were left jobless, up 136,800 people over the same period in 2019.
According to the GSO, 32.1 million people aged from 15 were affected by the pandemic, including those who lost their jobs and saw their working hours and incomes reduced.
Of the total, 69.2% of laborers saw their incomes shrinking, 39.9% worked for fewer hours or were furloughed and 14% were forced to quit.
Thuy added that the service sector was most affected by the pandemic with 71.6% of laborers being affected. The industry and construction sector came in second, followed by the agro-forestry-fishery sector, with 64.7% and 26.4% of laborers being affected, respectively.
Despite a hiring rise in the last quarter of last year over the two previous quarters, the number of jobless people was high in the second quarter. Therefore, the number of laborers aged from 15 in 2020 plummeted 1.3 million people over 2019 to 53.4 million.
The trend was completely contrary to the trend in 2010-2019, when the number of people with jobs increased by 600,000 on average.
The pandemic also caused a shortage of jobs. Without Covid-19, an additional 1.6 million laborers would have jobs.
Moreover, the average monthly income of workers was VND5.5 million each last year, down 2.3% against 2019.
The monthly incomes of laborers in the service sector faced the largest fall of some VND215,000, followed by those in the agro-forestry-fishery sector with a reduction of VND156,000 and the industry and construction sector with a decline of VND100,000.
