Those outstanding results were announced at a national teleconference on the implementation of labour and social security tasks in 2021, held by the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affair (MoLISA) on January 11.
Reports at the event showed that the sector’s outstanding mark last year was the whole labour and social affairs sector cooperating with functional agencies to implement a range of solutions to ensure social security for the people.
According to MoLISA Minister Dao Ngoc Dung, financial support from the Government's VND62 trillion support package has been disbursed to over 13 million people affected by the epidemic. Over 1.3 million people now have jobs thanks to action from various sides on job creation, while nearly 1.1 million people who lost their jobs have been assisted with unemployment allowances worth over VND18.2 trillion.
Realising the goal of leaving no one behind during national development, poverty reduction programmes and policies continue to be deployed synchronously, helping the proportion of multi-dimensional poor households decrease from 9.88% in 2015 to 2.75% by the end of 2020, while the average income of the poor in 2020 was 2.3 times higher than that of 2015.
For 2021, the sector has sets targets such as increasing the rate of trained labour to 66% (currently at 64.5%), and reducing the rate of poor households to 1-1.5% as well as creating jobs for more than 1 million workers.
To achieve these goals, in 2021 and the following years, the sector plans to coordinate with the relevant ministries and agencies to boost labour market development in line with vocational education, along with the building of a comprehensive social security system and integrating poverty reduction policies into local socio-economic development plans.
Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam speaks at the conference. (Photo: VGP)
Speaking at the conference, Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam acknowledged the efforts and highly appreciated the achievements of the sector in the last year.
He also pointed out some limitations that need to be addressed, including high quality human resources, social insurance coverage, unemployment rate among young labour force and unsustainable poverty reduction in some places.
He requested the sector coordinate with the relevant ministries and functional agencies to review both beneficiaries and social security policies, thereby bringing timely support policies to the right subjects.
In particular, social insurance policies need to be designed in a flexible, multi-layered direction to expand their range of coverage, especially in terms of voluntary social insurance policies, hence bit by bit realising the universal social insurance goal.
Poverty reduction policies should be suitable for each specific target group, with priority given to people in remote areas, ethnic minority communities and objects of social protection. Branches and localities should focus on taking care of social beneficiaries in difficult circumstances as the Lunar New Year (Tet) festival approaches, Deputy PM Dam stated.
