Vietnam workers live in fear of US tariffs

President Trump’s threat of 46% levies, among the highest for any country, is rattling Vietnam’s factory managers and workers, as well as thousands of exporters, write Alexandra Stevenson and Tung Ngo from Ho Chi Minh City

- Alexandra Stevenson and Tung Ngo

For Vietnam's legion of factory workers, the mathematics of making a living was complicated enough before US President Donald Trump announced a whopping tariff on the goods they make.

Nguyen Thi Tuyet Hanh worked two factory jobs, six days a week, for nearly a year after her husband lost his job in 2023. She had no other choice to help feed their four children and keep them in school.

“It was brutal,” Ms Hanh, 40, said. Her husband is working full time again at a factory, but Trump's plan to put a 46% tariff on imports from Vietnam hangs over their family, which lives in a row of concrete tenements on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City.

“My family lived through that difficult time — I don’t want to live it again,” said Ms Hanh, who earns $577 (about 19,000 baht) a month as a line manager overseeing 138 workers making shoes for Nike, the French sporting goods company Salomon and other global brands.

Fear is reverberating on her factory floor, alive with the hum of sewing machines stitching the fabric for shoes that are shipped to the United States. Trump paused the tariff on Vietnam, and similar levies on dozens of other countries, for 90 days. But it hardly matters here. The destabilising prospect that the tariffs will be reinstated is already chipping away at Vietnam's economic growth, which hinges on making things for American consumers.

Vietnam's textile and garment factories have paper-thin profit margins — an average of 5%, executives said. And while some of them have ramped up production to push out orders ahead of the tariff deadline in July, others have started to cut jobs or have frozen hiring as American retailers have begun to cancel orders.