"Toward fair compensation in Vietnam: Insights on reaching living wage", 10 April 2019

An analysis by the Fair Labor Association... finds that factory workers in Vietnam work excessive overtime, beyond what is acceptable by international standards, to close the significant gap between what they earn and what they need to provide for themselves and their families... The report’s key findings:

• Workers who earn a salary on par with living wage estimates do so only through excessive hours and days of work without rest... It is common for workers in facilities with rest day violations to work more than 50 hours of overtime a month.
• Although the average worker in FLA-affiliated factories in Vietnam earns more than double the legal minimum wage, a worker would need a pay increase of almost 25 percent to reach the lowest consensus living wage estimate, as benchmarked by the Global Living Wage Coalition.
• Under Vietnam’s proposed 5.3 percent minimum wage increase for 2019, minimum wages would remain less than half (48.2 percent) of the Global Living Wage Coalition benchmark.