Vietnamese migrants fill Romania’s worker crunch but face risk of exploitation

Romania’s labour shortage offers jobs for Vietnamese in welding, meatpacking and house painting but they are exposed to harsh conditions and even human smuggling

Advocates say Bucharest authorities have to fix its labour rights laws, especially if it now wants to take in Ukrainian refugees as workers

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An artist’s sketch of Huy, a Vietnamese worker in Romania. Artwork: Czarina Divinagracia

Published: 4:00pm, 16 Mar 2022Updated: 4:46pm, 16 Mar 2022

Van* had never seen snow or left her home country of Vietnam until she arrived in Romania. She is among hundreds of employees at a turkey meat producing plant in the small town of Codlea, about three hours from the capital Bucharest.

“I went far away to work so that my son can have a better life and his life will not be as hard as his mother’s,’’ Van told This Week in Asia, adding that she sends money home from the Eastern European state every month.

In 2019, Van, who is from a town in northern Vietnam followed in the footsteps of her sister-in-law – a former labour migrant in Romania- and paid a recruitment agency US$2,800 to bring her to the European Union (EU) member state. Romania is one of the poorest in the bloc, but Van said it was “cheaper” to head there to find work than elsewhere.

As Western European countries solved their labour shortage by recruiting millions of Romanians and other Eastern European citizens, Romania is now finding itself in a similar situation and importing thousands of Vietnamese, Indian and Nepalese to fill the void. Its tight labour situation is compounded by a population decline fuelled by low birth rates and an ageing population. Since 2010, one-tenth of the population or more than 2.4 million people have left Romania, according to data from its National Institute of Statistics.

Yet Romania’s limited legal and labour rights infrastructure – plus a lack of support from migrants’ home countries – means migrant workers are vulnerable to risks of exploitation there.

More Vietnamese have gone to Romania to work in recent years, even though the country has received migrants from Vietnam since both countries established diplomatic relations in 1950.

Data on work permits issued to non-EU and Romanian citizens through the Freedom of Information Act shows for the three years between 2017 and 2019, Vietnamese were the largest group of newly-admitted foreign workers in Romania.