Once done, the 64-year-old quickly crosses the now empty parking lot to escape the sweltering July heat. As she crosses the first floor, she opens the doors to the empty rooms to filter out the smell of mold.
The silence is only occasionally disturbed by the noise of vehicles carrying the goods of departing workers.
Alley 58 on Fifth Street, Tan Tao A Ward, Binh Tan District, HCMC was once known as a workers’ pension hub, but the place has never been so desolate.
With its convenient location near industrial areas, the 150-200 rooms for rent in the alley were once all occupied by factory workers, but now, according to My, “boards of rooms for rent outnumber tenants. “.
Once the panels fade from exposure to the sun, owners take them down, repair them, and then hang them up.
“Workers these days don’t even have enough money for food, let alone rent,” My says, pointing to two workers bent over to prepare vegetables and boil pork skin for lunch after their working hours have been reduced.
My’s house is one mile from Pouyen LLC, Ho Chi Minh City’s largest employer. In 2013, My built 15 rooms with kitchens, separate bathrooms and a loft, all for rent to factory workers.
Unfortunately, the massive layoffs in February 2023 made it difficult for workers to stay in the city, prompting many to say goodbye to My and return to their hometowns.
“They say that at least at home they will be able to fish or grow vegetables to earn a living. There is no work for them in town,” she says.
Previously, each room was occupied by two to three people. But now each of the few occupied rooms has only one person living there. Their hours having been reduced, they are barely hanging on, scrambling to find new jobs.
Since May, My has reduced his rent by 100,000 VND (4.2 USD) for new tenants, but the situation has not improved. Nearly half of its rooms remain vacant.
Despite this, My’s situation is still not as tense as that of the other landlords.
Le Thi Tung, 44, feels like she is sitting on a bed of fire as 12 of her 20 rental rooms are unoccupied, while the rent she has to pay for the land (VND 17 million) is n hasn’t gone down a penny.
“Empty like I’ve never seen before,” she said.
Tung was once convinced that her rent was the cheapest on the market. She charged 800,000 to 850,000 VND per month, which encouraged Pouyen workers to fill all her rooms during the 15 years she was in business.
Every month, she profited from both her rental business and her convenience store. But Tung has been hit hard by the wave of layoffs in 2022. At first three of her rooms were vacated, then they rose to five, and the current peak of 12 began in the first quarter of this year.
According to Tung, the rows of boarding houses once looked like a “bustling beehive”, filled to the brim with employees walking in and out.
With no tenants to take care of the rooms, Thu Hoa, 66, has to go up and clean the two third-floor rooms every two weeks to make sure they are tidy enough in case new tenants come in. . About 80% of its tenants are workers from Pouyen, the rest are construction workers and security guards.
“Every time I read about workers being laid off, I get more and more upset,” she says.
Over the past two months, Hoa has had to ask relatives and acquaintances to find him tenants. If they could, she would give them a commission of 100,000 VND. But even when she lowered the rent from 150,000 to 200,000 VND, no one was interested.
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Alley 58 on Fifth Street, Tan Tao A Ward, Binh Tan District, HCMC was once known as a workers’ pension hub, but the place is desolate, July 28, 2023. Photo by Ngoc Ngan |
Trang, a 36-year-old worker in Pouyen, always does her best to stay in town. When Pouyen started laying off employees, three of her friends went home, while she chose to stay even though she only worked four days a week.
Trang’s colleagues are among 1.07 million unemployed Vietnamese among the working-age population, according to Vietnam’s General Statistics Office. The figure is an increase of 54,000 from the previous quarter. The jump was largely due to many companies receiving weak orders, which caused them to cut costs.
The southeastern part of the country, the region with the highest concentration of large-scale industrial zones, was the hardest hit. HCMC alone has an unemployment rate of 3.71%, an increase from the previous quarter. Pouyen LLC has implemented two waves of staff reductions since the start of 2023.
Nguyen Chi Hung, the civilian head of Ward 3, says his area accounts for one-third of Tan Tao A Ward’s population, with the majority being out-of-town workers who rent rooms near their workplaces. . The population decline started during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the nadir reached this year by dropping from 22,000 people to 15,000 people.
Hearing that there will be another round of layoffs in August, My can do nothing but sigh and make plans for her family.
“If our whole family saves and spends our money wisely, maybe we can weather this storm,” she says.
