Posts by Russell Brown
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I turned on the TV last night to see our export to Vietnam: education. From what I could make out "Educated in New Zealand" is pitched as a premium brand.
FWIW, Vietnam has a literacy rate of 90% and a significant value is placed on education. OTOH, I gathered from the coversation I had yesterday that exam cheating is rife at tertiary level.
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Wow. Just spent a couple of hours having layers of meaning explained to me by Kevin Miller, a Japanese-American blogger, former non-profit volunteer and Linux guy. It's a complicated place.
Point of interest: the guy whos' screwing his workers is most likely to be either a returning expat Vietnamese or perhaps a Korean.
Also: demand continues to exceeed supply of labour in IT, and local staff will come and go at will - churn's a big problem. They earn up to $US1000 ($1500 tops) per month, which is quite a tasty wage here.
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Where exactly does that "scale and speed" come from, who pays for it, and who benefits? There's more to being on the left than supporting civil unions and buying Fair Trade. Start buying into this right-wing low-wage outsourcing crap and you might as well join the BlueLibs.
So you're going to tell anyone in a country where wages are lower than New Zealand they can't play? How would you like it if the US or Europe took the same attitude to New Zealand? Do you approve of what the US trade regulator is doing to Vietnam at the moment - ie: declaring that the Vietnamese apparel trade is "dumping" and holding hundreds of small businesses over a barrel?
I don't think this is simple. Yes, wages here are low, and so is the cost of living. But wages in Vietnam have doubled in the past decade, there is a minimum wage and, in many ways, stronger labour laws than those in New Zealand.
I think political freedom is a much bigger issue - and that includes the fact that the trade unions are sponsored by the government, which has been known to fudge. But when 40,000 workers staged wildcat strikes in 2005, the government moved, and the minimum wage went up. In the 1990s, Nike was successfully shamed into improving its woeful labour practices here - that's a good thing.
If Vietnam is able to produce skilled IT workers while we churn out ever more lawyers, then good luck to them. These are entrepreneurial people working inside a command economy, and cutting them off at the knees - for their own good, of course - doesn't seem very kind to me.
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and probably tougher than the US.
Those creepy extra-territorial US zones seem to be the worst places by far. No proper labour laws, no press freedom, no civil society. Being an outpost of the Land of the Free doesn't offer much freedom, it seems.
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Sorry to be a little bit cynical here, but is this only going to be the "Good News from the Sweatshop" tour? Or are we in for some more critical reportage of "Oriental Despotisms" meeting Western (and Japanese and Singaporean) Capital?
I thought the implication from the phrase "sausage factory" was pretty clear that not all the foreign investment here is equal in nature. The American company we visted yesterday was very much commoditised IT outsourcing, and the Japanese training venture wasn't exactly inspiring either. I think the fact that the kids working for Augen get to make design decisions and communicate directly with New Zealand clients is pretty cool.
The opportunity to get a programmming/IT job and training isn't to be sniffed at for young people here. And Vietnam, unlike New Zealand, is actually turning out increasing numbers of computing graduates.
There's also the reality of not embarrassing or making things difficult for the people I'm with and, as Graham says in his post, the fact that the Vietnamese people are generally delightful. I had to wriggle out of having a translator (ie: government minder) before I left NZ - that was quite a relief.
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I did see a group of Vietnamese fishermen outside your place looking very embarrassed.
Heh. If only.
After a brief, glorious hour of being about to send as well as receive email, I am back to being able to do neither. Can't login to webmail either. I do not feel well served by Ihug.
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My email's back. - smtp and all. About bloody time.
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SEA-ME-WE3 has a landing in Đà Nẵng, and the NEC submarine cable map shows at least one landing in Vietnam. Starhub has another nice picture. There are bound to be many more, all owned by various consortia.
It would be interesting to see them all on one detailed map.
Yeah, the data centre guys (who also serve five ISPs) said they had multiple links, including land links. It's interesting that the politicians are emphasiing the undersea cables, because it doesn't seem like the risk of total loss of service is great.
I think bandwidth appetites here are a bit lower though. Augen has a 1Mbit/s service, and a bigger company we vistted today only has 2Mbit/s. It does seem like they get their rated speeds though.
Oh, and by the way: fuck Ihug. Still no webmail for me. I'll have to see if I can at least retrieve POP mail when I get back to the hotel later tonight.
I think I'm joining the gmail for domains club when I get home ...
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Oh Russell! For a moment there you started to sound ever so slightly like Thomas Friedman...
Well, I am the Magazine Publishers' Association business columnist of the year the past three years running ...
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I might add that for both the US and Vietnam I had to get a special journalist's visa. For Vietnam, that was the end of the matter; for the US it became part of the problem on entry, when the dolt on the desk refused to accept that a journalist could actually be going to a conference. Weird.
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