VietNamNet Bridge – Managers of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) complain they receive “starvation wages”, but labor experts say the salaries are too high compared with their productivity.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said at a working session with the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) on October 2 that the power sector’s most serious problem is not the price of electricity, but low productivity of staff.

Dung asked the Electricity of Vietnam (EVN) to cut waste in its organization after hearing a report that the average labor productivity was equal to 10 percent of Singapore’s and 40 percent of Thailand’s.

EVN’s managers admitted that the labor productivity is too low. The HCM City Power Corporation, for example, has labor productivity of 2.9 million kwh per head. Meanwhile, the figure is 2.9 million kwh in Malaysia, and 7.5 million kwh in Japan.

“What are the reasons behind the low productivity, low qualification of workers, out-of-date technologies, or cumbersome apparatus?” Dung asked.

Pham Le Thanh, EVN’s general director, said nearly all operations can be done automatically thanks to modern technologies in other countries, but they are still done manually in Vietnam.

“EVN, for example, needs a high number of workers in charge of measuring the electricity usage of households, and collecting money from users,” Thanh said, adding that this work alone had been assigned to 67,000 workers.

Meanwhile, in other countries, electronic meters are used to measure usage, and the information is reported automatically to operation centers which calculate the fees customers have to pay and then issue bills.

Power companies do not have to send workers to every household to collect fees, because consumers can pay via banks.

“This is one of the major reasons that causes low productivity,” Thanh said.

However, he said that EVN has asked all of its subsidiaries to stop recruiting new workers, promising that EVN will try to increase labor productivity to a level equal to Malaysia’s and Thailand’s by 2020.

Thanh said that 67,000 workers now undertake the simple job of recording the electricity usage consumed by households and collecting money. This number stirred up public debate.

EVN has corrected the information, now saying that 67,000 represented the number of workers in all phases related to electricity trade and distribution. Recording the electricity consumed and collecting money are only two phases of the process.

However, EVN said it was still unclear how many workers are actually doing the job now.

Though admitting low labor productivity, the high rate of the electricity loss during the transmission process and many other existing problems, EVN’s managers still receive “unreasonably sky-high salaries”, which has been criticized by the public.

A report of the Ministry of Industry and Trade about the wages of 120 managers of 11 state-owned economic groups and general corporations showed that EVN’s general director Pham Le Thanh received VND53.43 million a month in 2013.

Pham Huyen