A seminar on "Vietnam Impressions: Informal Labor and the Impact of the Covid Pandemic" was organized by the Marmara University Turkic Studies Institute on Wednesday, November 8, within the scope of the Turkic Studies Seminars series. LABOUR (Tackling İnformal Employment İn Asia: Building Post-COV19 Solutions To Precariousness Through Case-Study Based Evidence On Bhutan, Laos, Maldives, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand And Vietnam) Project, carried out within the scope of the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme, was attended only Marmara University from Turkey.
Assoc. Prof. Nurşen Gürboğa from the Faculty of Political Sciences and Lecturer of the Turkic Studies Institute Dr. Liaisan Şahin, who were assigned to this project under the umbrella of the Center for Sustainable Development Studies (CSDS) in Vietnam, made a presentation and shared the details of their research and their impressions of Vietnam. Gürboğa and Şahin stated that, according to the data of the International Labor Organization (ILO), approximately 61 percent of the world's working population (2 billion people) is in the informal economy and that this number has increased much more, especially in Asian countries.
Stating that 68.2 percent of the working population in Asia works in informal jobs, Gürboğa and Şahin said, “The LABOUR project, which was launched on January 1, 2022 within the scope of the European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Program (https://www.labour-rise.eu/). ), is aimed to collect information about the problem of labor insecurity in Asian countries and the local policies and solutions produced to overcome this problem, to create a suitable environment for sharing information and experience on this subject between Europe and Asia, and to develop ideas and suggestions that may be useful for decision-makers and various organizations.
Gürboğa and Şahin gave information about the results of the research they conducted within the scope of the LABOUR project in Vietnam and stated that they choosed domestic workers in Hanoi as the target audience of the research, examined women between the ages of 15-55 who migrated to the city from rural areas and worked without a formal employment contract and social security, used semi-structured survey and in-depth interview methods in the research and collected information about their experiences in health services, the support they received from the state and non-governmental organizations, the problems they encountered in this regard and similar issues. Gürboğa and Şahin commented on the data they obtained and talked about the preliminary results of the research. Then, after expressing some of their impressions about daily life and cultural characteristics in Vietnam, they ended the seminar by answering questions from the audience.
