Life in the rickshaw economy

By Carroll du Chateau

Every morning Tam gets up at dawn, leaves his three co-workers still sleeping under the mosquito net suspended from a restaurant table, folds his bedsheet, brushes down his trousers and goes off for a wash and a trip to a communal toilet.

Within minutes he's spruced up for a long day of waiting tables in the Hanoi restaurant that doubles as his bedroom.

For his 12 hour-plus day Tam will make around $US230 a year.

Tam is one of over 73 million predominantly young (39 per cent under 15) energetic, keen to work, resourceful and physically stunning Vietnamese living in one of the world's two remaining communist countries.

Despite the spartan living conditions, literacy runs at a staggering 93.7 per cent.

After 2000 years of exploitation by countries as diverse as China, France, the US and Russia, plus the devastating effects of ÔThe American War', as they call it, and the 20-year trade embargo that followed, the country is starved of infrastructure.

People ride bikes and drag each other Ð and the increasing numbers of expatriate business people Ð around in bike-style rickshaws knows as cyclos. Rivers are crossed by car ferries rather than bridges. The roads that do exist are studded with huge pot holes. Very few are sealed. Paddy fields are planted by hand, rather than machine.

And people seem extraordinarily happy.

Vietnam is also resource rich: the third-largest rice exporter in the world, fertile, rich in oil and mineral deposits including coal, bauxite and gold.

So what can Vietnam offer Apec Ð more important, what can Apec offer Vietnam?

Troy is woken by the electronic alarm on his bedroom TV set. Rolling over he hits the channel button and a blonde announcer starts to fill him in on the news and weather for the day ahead.

He gets up, grabs a frozen orange juice, slaps a couple of blueberry muffins in the toaster, switches on the coffee machine. Ten minutes in the pulsating jet shower then it's into the lift, and then the air conditioned coupe for the drive to work.

Plenty of time to make his morning calls on the cellphone before hitting the office at 8.30.

For his eight hours a day, five days a week Troy will make $US30,160 over the year.

The self-described "most powerful, diverse and technologically-advanced economy in the world", the US has created the world's most modern society.

America has 240,000 km of mainline railway routes, 1092 TV broadcast stations plus roughly 9000 cable TV systems, 215 million TV sets, 182 million telephones, 6.42 million km of highway and 14,574 airports.

Life expectancy is 76.4 Ð a full decade more than it is in Vietnam.

In fact, the only area where the US is almost matched by Vietnam is in literacy where Americans outstrip the Vietnamese by 5.3 per cent to reach 99 per cent.

The big difference between the two is political. While Vietnam is communist, or at least socialist, the US is a front runner in the democratic stakes, fiercely independent and leads the world in market oriented business.

While the system has produced probably the highest standard of living in Apec (when adjusted for spending power) it has also produced a two tier labour market in which those at the bottom lack the education and the professional and technical skills of those at the top of the scale.

This slice of American society fails to get pay rises, health insurance and other benefits. Biggest losers in
the American system are the unemployed (4.9 per cent) who come at the very bottom of the social and material heap.