[Marxism] Vietnamese workers screwed in Czech republic

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, June 7, 2009
Czechs Cool to Presence of Workers From Asia
By DAN BILEFSKY

PRAGUE — Trieu Dinh Van’s long journey two years ago from the rice 
paddies of northern Vietnam to a truck-welding factory in the Czech 
Republic was supposed to open up an economic lifeline. His parents, poor 
farmers, bet everything on him, putting up the family farm as collateral 
for a loan of about $14,000 to pay an agent for his plane ticket and 
working visa.

Instead, Mr. Van, 25, is jobless, homeless and heavily indebted in a 
faraway land, set adrift by a global economic crisis that swallowed his 
$11-an-hour job and those of thousands among the wave of 20,000 
Vietnamese workers who came here in 2007.

The Vietnamese workers are part of a larger influx of poor Asian 
workers, including tens of thousands from China, Mongolia and elsewhere, 
who were recruited to come to Eastern Europe to become low-skilled foot 
soldiers in then booming economies. Now, they have been hit particularly 
hard by the sudden contraction of those economies.

In Romania, hundreds of desperate Chinese migrants camped out in 
freezing temperatures in Bucharest for several weeks in a protest 
against contractors who had stopped paying them.

In the Czech Republic, soaring unemployment, which economists think 
could hit 8 percent by year’s end, has driven many Czechs to seek the 
low-wage work they once left to foreign laborers.

There has been a corresponding surge of resentment against minorities 
here, leading to fears of attacks like the one last month in which a 
young Roma child and her parents were severely burned when their home 
was firebombed in the northeastern town of Vitkov.

Vietnamese workers have been a particular point of contention, even 
though there is a longstanding Vietnamese community here, born amid the 
fraternal work programs in the 1970s.

“The Czechs don’t like us because we look different,” said Mr. Van, who 
lamented that he had already been accosted in Chocen, the small 
industrial town in eastern Bohemia where he worked, by locals shouting, 
“Vietnamese, go home!” Vietnamese laborers, he said, were also denied 
access to local discos and restaurants.

The government has responded by trying to find ways to ship out Asian 
immigrants. Under a voluntary return policy started in February, any 
unemployed foreign worker who wants to go home is eligible for free 
one-way air or rail fare and about $700 in cash.

In the first two months, about 2,000 Mongolians, Ukrainians and Kazakhs 
took up the offer.

But like Mr. Van, many of the Vietnamese workers here, saddled with 
debt, would prefer to stay and wait for better times.

“It would not be good for me to go back to Vietnam,” he said on a recent 
day, wondering where he would spend the night. “I would return home with 
empty hands and couldn’t marry or build a house. That would be a great 
shame for me.”

Ivan Langer, who until recently was the interior minister and devised 
the return policy, said he worried that an estimated 12,000 jobless 
foreign workers were vulnerable to becoming involved in organized crime 
or being exploited as slave labor.

Julie Lien Vrbkova, who has worked as a Vietnamese interpreter at 
several automobile factories in the Czech Republic, said she had been 
shocked by “slave-like” working conditions, including 12-hour days 
during which Vietnamese workers were beaten if they stopped working.

At one factory, she recalled, a Vietnamese man had worked a week with a 
broken rib because he was afraid to ask for time off.

The tensions are a troubling setback for the Vietnamese community here, 
long considered a regional success story. Many own thriving corner 
shops, speak Czech, and send their children to mainstream public 
schools, where they are routinely ranked at the top of their classes.

After the overthrow of Communism in 1989, thousands more Vietnamese 
joined those who arrived in the 1970s. Today there are an estimated 
70,000 Vietnamese in the Czech Republic, the second largest foreign 
community after Ukrainians.

But Vietnamese leaders here say they fear the new class of dispossessed 
workers threatens to disturb a coexistence they built over decades. An 
April poll by Stem, a Prague-based public opinion firm, found that 66 
percent of Czech respondents said they would not like to have a 
Vietnamese person as a neighbor.

Linh Nguyen, 22, a second-generation Vietnamese Czech who is campaigning 
for the government to improve its integration policies, said the 
hardworking Vietnamese preferred to quietly prosper while the Czechs 
were content to pretend they were not there.

He lamented that four decades after the first Asian migrants arrived in 
the Czech Republic, there were no Asian faces on television, in Czech 
popular culture or in Parliament.

In an effort to improve integration, the government recently introduced 
new rules that require immigrants who want to acquire a business license 
to have 120 hours of introductory Czech; but the lessons cost about 
$250, a price that many poor migrants cannot afford to pay.

The challenges of assimilation are evident at Sapa, a sprawling 
Vietnamese market on the outskirts of Prague, where newly arrived 
migrants can find Vietnamese hairdressers, Vietnamese insurance 
companies and a thriving business of Czech-speaking Vietnamese 
“middlemen,” who for fees ranging from about $25 to perhaps $7,000, can 
arrange for visas, take fellow Vietnamese to doctors and attend 
parent-teacher meetings as surrogates.

Trang Thu Tran, 21, a Vietnamese blogger, who came to the Czech Republic 
when she was 13 and now calls herself Tereza, after a Czech soap opera 
star, said the construction of a separate and parallel world meant that 
many Vietnamese, including those in the country for decades, could not 
speak Czech and were forced to phone a middleman to interpret, even when 
pulled over in their cars by Czech police officers.

Tran Qang Hung, the managing director of Sapa, said many jobless 
migrants were coming to the market in a vain search for work.

He said he had proposed to the Czech government building a school for 
the migrants, where they could study Czech and become more employable. 
But he said he had been turned down.

“Now that the economy is bad, the Czechs don’t want these people here,” 
he said. “They only want them to go home.”



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