Culture News Blog

Viet Nam is one of the few developing countries to offer maternity leave that is on a par with developed nations.

According to APESMA (Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers, Australia), maternity leave offered in Viet Nam is better than in many developed nations, such as the United States (12 weeks unpaid maternity leave), Australia (one year unpaid leave), Japan (14 weeks at 60 per cent of salary) and Germany (14 weeks full-salary).

"Viet Nam has made a great leap forward in giving longer [paid maternity leave] than many [developed] countries, even some European countries," said International Labour Organisation (ILO) Viet Nam director Rie Vejs Kjeldgaard.

Viet Nam was the first country in Asia and the second in the world to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990. The convention highlights the importance of breast-feeding but only 17 per cent of infants in Viet Nam are exclusively breast-fed for the first six months of their lives, according to the UN report.

"The WHO recommends exclusive breast-feeding for children up to six months of age. If Viet Nam can extend maternity leave to six months, it would give the child a proper start in life," says World Health Organisation representative in Viet Nam Dr Jean-Marc Olive.

He warns that it is important to beast-feed exclusively. "If you reduce the intake of milk for the child, you will reduce the production of milk from the mother because the breast is a very sophisticated machine and the more the child is breast-fed, the more milk is produced," he says.

Olive adds that the composition of breast milk changes as the child gets older, which is ideal for the growing infant’s nutritional needs.

Breast-feeding stimulates the baby’s immune system and protects them from the two of the main causes of infant mortality in the developing world, diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections, according to the UN report.

"We need to re-establish in Viet Nam a culture of breast-feeding – particularly among poor people, for whom buying formula is a waste of money and a dangerous way of raising a child," says Olive.

Truong My Hanh, a human resources manager for the HiPT Group, says many female employees ask for an additional two to four weeks’ unpaid leave to devote more time to their children after the four-month maternity leave period.

The trade union chairwoman at Garment 10 Joint Stock Company Thach Thi Hue says it was a similar story at her firm.

"There have been only a few cases where young mothers come back to work when they are expected to by my company. If they don’t ask for unpaid leave they will ask for sick leave," she says.

"If the State raises maternity to six months, young mothers’ worries will be eased, which will be better for their employers and society," says Viet Nam Female Deputy Group vice chairwoman Nguyen Thi Bach Mai.

In 1985, the Vietnamese Government raised maternity leave to six months after researches by the National Nutrition Institute showed that more than 50 per cent of under-fives were malnourished and that the death rate among under-ones was 81 per thousand when mothers had only two-month maternity leave.

However, the move was considered uneconomic and the Government in 1990 reduced maternity leave to four months.

HiPT Group’s Hanh says longer maternity leave would be unaffordable for her IT company where 40 per cent of its 400 employees are women.

"We don’t employ seasonal workers to replace women on maternity leave because it takes a lot of time and effort to train them," she says.

Extending maternity leave in a textile firm like Garment 10 Joint Stock Company where 82 per cent of the 8,000 workforce are women would have far more serious financial consequences, says Hue.

"To ease the burden on enterprises, we would like the State to consider decreasing corporate income tax from 25 per cent to about 20 per cent.

We’ll use the difference to offer better conditions to our female employees."

Mai says the State will have to offer preferential policies to enterprises that employ a high percentage of women if it extends maternity leave.

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