Vietnam’s Factories Are Open Again. Where Are the Workers?

For the better part of five years, Le Thi Kim Dung sewed jeans for American brands at a sprawling industrial complex on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. When the delta variant of the coronavirus swept through the area last summer, authorities ordered the factory where she worked to shut down—while imposing a travel ban that stranded Dung and her husband in a cramped boarding house with a community toilet down the hall. In October, when restrictions eased, the two hopped on a motorbike and drove 100 miles south to their native village in the Mekong Delta—and Dung isn’t sure they’ll go back. “I’m so scared,” says the 34-year-old. “A lot of people got infected and were taken away.”

The global economy has a lot riding on the decisions of hundreds of thousands of people like Dung, who fill factories the size of football fields, owned by multinationals and local companies alike. As relations between the U.S. and China have deteriorated, Vietnam has emerged as a manufacturing hot spot, with annual exports climbing almost twentyfold in the past two decades, to $283 billion in 2020. Samsung Electronics Co. manufactures refrigerators and dishwashers there; subcontractors for Urban Outfitters, Calvin Klein, and Gap make T-shirts, jeans, and sweaters; and Nike, Adidas, and Puma get hundreds of millions of pairs of shoes.