From Exporting Workers to Importing Them: Vietnam’s New Labour Reality

A recent social media post has attracted considerable attention in Vietnam: “More and more young Bangladeshis are coming to Southeast Vietnam to work as labourers”. Accompanying photographs showed hundreds of Bangladeshi workers attending a legal and traffic safety briefing at a factory in southern Vietnam. The images felt unfamiliar: Vietnam has long been known as a country that exports labour, with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese working in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Middle East.

Yet this scene reflects a structural shift, not an anomaly. The arrival of foreign unskilled workers marks the beginning of a long-term trend and is, in many respects, a consequence of Vietnam’s economic success rather than a sign of weakness. The real challenge is not whether Vietnam should import unskilled labour, but how to manage the process while protecting domestic workers.

Several structural factors make this trend virtually inevitable.

The first and most unforgiving driver is demography. Vietnam’s population is aging faster than its income allows. The share of Vietnamese aged 65 and above rose from 6.2 per cent in 2005 to 9.5 per cent in 2025, while the age dependency ratio (the number of children and elderly per 100 working-age people) increased from 43.1 per cent in 2013 to 47.7 per cent in 2024. The workforce is projected to enter a sustained decline as the elderly population swells. In 2024, Vietnam’s population aged 60 and older was 14.2 million; this is expected to increase to 20.9 million by 2034. The figure is expected to climb thereafter, meaning fewer young Vietnamese will be entering the labour market each year even as factories keep opening.

The second driver is competition for unskilled labour. Foreign-invested factories have proliferated so quickly that provinces can no longer staff them locally. Bac Ninh Province alone needs to recruit more than 230,000 new workers in 2026 to meet the needs of its industrial parks, where electronics manufacturing accounts for most of the demand for unskilled labour. At a job fair last December, 30 companies sought 35,000 workers; fewer than 10 per cent of the positions were filled. When provinces pool labour from neighbouring localities and still come up short, the economic logic increasingly points towards recruiting from abroad.

The third driver is economic upgrading. As the economy moves up the value chain, more Vietnamese workers are shifting into higher-skilled and better-paid occupations, leaving fewer willing to take physically demanding jobs. Labour market preferences are also evolving. Search interest in “freelancer” has remained consistently high on Google Trends since 2023, reflecting many workers’ preference for flexibility over the physical toll of working in a construction site or a factory. While rational at the individual level, this shift further shrinks the pool of workers available for manual labour.

For foreign investors, the message is clear. Vietnam is no longer a haven for cheap, abundant labour, and investment strategies built on that premise are rapidly becoming obsolete.

The fourth driver is Vietnam’s own ambition. The country is in the midst of an infrastructure boom, which has generated enormous demand for labour. VinCons, Vingroup’s construction arm, is recruiting more than 100,000 workers nationwide, offering VND 14–33 million (USD 530–1,250) a month for general workers and up to VND 41–47 million (USD 1,560–1,790) for site supervisors. Such wages, significantly higher than Vietnam’s average monthly wage of USD 345, would have been unthinkable a decade ago, yet employers still struggle to recruit enough workers. Even Long Thanh International Airport, one of the country’s largest infrastructure projects, reported in April a shortage of about 5,500 workers against a requirement of 14,000, threatening construction progress.

Importing unskilled labour should therefore not be seen as a problem for Vietnam. If domestic supply cannot meet demand, recruiting foreign workers is neither unusual nor undesirable. What would be counterproductive is a regulatory regime that prevents firms from hiring them when genuine shortages exist. By the end of 2025, Vietnam had 162,858 foreign workers, of whom 140,442 (86.2 per cent) were skilled workers. Under Vietnam’s 2019 Labour Code, foreign nationals may generally be employed only in managerial, executive, expert or technical positions that Vietnamese workers cannot fill. While intended to protect local employment, these restrictions risk constraining labour-intensive industries such as garments, footwear and particularly construction at a time of unprecedented infrastructure expansion.

Vietnam’s labour market has come full circle. Its post-Đổi Mới growth was partly built on exporting unskilled workers. As of 2024, more than 700,000 Vietnamese were working overseas under contract, remitting an estimated USD 3.5–4 billion annually. Today, Vietnam is increasingly importing workers to keep its factories and construction sites running, not because its economy is weakening, but because it is advancing. This is similar to South Korea’s road to development: it sent miners and nurses to West Germany and over a million construction workers to the Middle East in the 1970s and early 1980s, but flipped into a labour-importing economy by the late 1980s as domestic wages rose and Koreans turned away from manual work.

Looking Ahead

For foreign investors, the message is clear. Vietnam is no longer a haven for cheap, abundant labour, and investment strategies built on that premise are rapidly becoming obsolete. Labour-intensive manufacturing will yield diminishing returns, while high-value, technology-intensive industries are increasingly favoured by policymakers. Politburo Resolution No. 10, issued on 8 June 2026, reflects this shift by prioritising technology, innovation and high-quality FDI, with the goal of making Vietnam one of ASEAN’s leading investment destinations by 2030. The direction of travel is unambiguous: Vietnam wants fewer sweatshops and more semiconductor plants.

The remaining challenge is policy. Vietnam needs a more flexible legal framework that allows businesses to recruit foreign unskilled workers when genuine shortages arise, while protecting domestic workers and preventing wage suppression. At the same time, it needs to retrain and upskill Vietnamese workers who are leaving manual occupations so they can move into higher-value jobs.

The sight of Bangladeshi workers on Vietnamese construction sites or factory floors should not be seen as Vietnamese workers losing opportunities. Rather, it reflects Vietnam’s ascent up the development ladder. The real test of success is not whether Vietnam imports unskilled labour, but whether it can turn today’s labour shortages into tomorrow’s high-productivity economy. As Vietnam transitions to a more advanced economy, foreign workers will fill temporary gaps while Vietnamese workers move into more productive roles.

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