As labour shortage is becoming an issue for Vietnam’s garment factories, a few factories are having a major focus on the facilities for the workers.
As per a report of The Wall Street Journal, in a Vietnamese factory, the workplace features floor-to-ceiling windows and a cafe serving matcha tea, as well as free yoga and dance classes. Every month, workers gather at team-building sessions to drink beer, drive go-karts and go bowling.
The report underlines that young people, by and large, don’t want to work in factories. They have more options to work comfortably in other sectors and even earn more. That’s why the garment factoriesare trying to make the manufacturing floor more enticing, and why alarm bells are ringing at Western companies that rely on the region’s inexpensive labour to churn out affordable consumer goods.
“There’s nowhere left on the planet that’s going to be able to give you what you want,” said Paul Norriss, the British co-founder of the Vietnam garment factory, UnAvailable, based in Ho Chi Minh City. “People are going to have to change their consumer habits, and so are brands.”
Workers in their 20s—the garment industry’s traditional labour force—routinely drop out of his company’s training program, Norriss said. Those who stay often work for just a couple of years. Norriss hopes that dialing up the workplace cool quotient might make a difference.
It is also worth mentioning here that factory wages in Vietnam, a leading apparel exporting country, have more than doubled since 2011, to US $ 320 a month—three times the rate of increase in the US, according to data from the United Nations International Labor Organization.