Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui

Vietnam must allow free workers' unions if it wants to liberalise trade with the US, a group of American senators said Wednesday during a visit to the communist country.

Foreign residents living in Vietnam without work permits said Monday that they worried new government regulations would force them to leave the country.

Nearly 500 Vietnamese workers in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, were deported home to central Vietnam Saturday after a fight broke out among some of them, local newswire Vietnamnet reported.

NANNING - In a detention house in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, on the Vietnam border, Hai Li, 18, an illegal immigrant from Vietnam, represents her fellow townspeople as they communicate with the police.

Moscow - Three years ago, Cuong left his wife and two children in Vietnam and went to Russia in search of a job.

Vietnamese property developer Dang Thanh Tam, one of the country's richest men, is trying to lure companies from China to his industrial parks with the promise of cheap labour costs.

Vietnam's labour costs are rising, despite the continual economic downturn which has stunted employment across the nation.

Vietnam during the first half of 2009 had sent 33,435 workers abroad, over 30 percent of the year's target but down 17 percent year-on-year, reported Ministry of Labour, Invalid and Social Affairs' Overseas Labour Management Department.

PRAGUE — For Trieu Dinh Van, 25, the long journey two years ago from the rice paddies of northern Vietnam to a truck-welding factory in eastern Bohemia was supposed to provide an economic lifeline. Instead Mr. Van, the son of poor, peasant farmers, is jobless, homeless and heavily indebted in a faraway land.

HANOI — Chinese products and workers, rather than those from Vietnam, are being used for key industrial projects in the fast-developing country, a report quoted top officials as saying Saturday.

Hanoi - One construction worker was killed and another seriously injured in Ho Chi Minh City when a span of the bridge they were building collapsed, a doctor said Wednesday.

Hanoi - The global economic slowdown will cause job losses in Vietnam in 2009 up to five times higher than those in 2008, government officials said Monday.

Hanoi - Panasonic Corp confirmed Friday that it was shedding jobs at its factories in Vietnam, joining a raft of companies laying off workers there as the economy slows. Panasonic Vietnam general director Shinya Abe said the company had offered workers at its plant outside Hanoi a "voluntary resignation plan" at the end of January but did not yet know how many would accept the offer.

Vietnam was hit by a record 762 labour strikes last year, many of them in textile and footwear plants, as workers struggled with costs amid spiralling inflation, a labour union official said Thursday.