Russia has barred 45,000 Vietnamese women from having children. The women are selected from the brigades of the unemployed (44)in the cities of Vietnam and sent to Russia to acquire much-needed industrial skills. But it is a type of aid that seems to benefit the donor more than the recipient.

An agreement signed in April 1981(43, This essay was written in 1991. It suggests that the program had been carried out for ten years, a decade) sets out many restrictive practices, which govern the workers’ lives. To start with, the women are forbidden to give birth: discovery of a pregnancy means probable deportation(48, Change the part of speech) . Only if a pregnancy is not discovered until the sixth month is a Vietnamese woman entitled to the same rights as a Russian woman, but this is rendered unlikely by the government’s insistence on a doctor inspecting them every twelve weeks. It is not known how many women are deported on this basis. Last year (50) about 190 were expelled, mostly for “breaches of discipline” or illness(51, get the sense, and fit into the passage) . The alternative is for the pregnancy to be terminated immediately, an offer, which is too often accepted.

Some women go to Russia with their husbands, only to find that they have been allocated to cities thousands of kilometers apart (52) . Travel restrictions conspire to keep them separated; they may visit each other legally only if they have received prior permission from their employers, the police, the local authorities and the wardens of their hotels. Naturally the rules are flouted and it is estimated that up to 100 Vietnamese are illegally on the move in any one day.

Furthermore, it is a requirement of the Russian authorities that the women leave their children behind in Vietnam. And until last year, women were not allowed to visit their homeland at all during the four-year stay (54) in Russia. They are now allowed home once, but only with their employer’s consent. (Men, who go for six years, are allowed home after three)(53, get the sense)

Paid in worthless rubles, the women were originally allowed to take home whatever they had bought (although mothers complained they were not allowed to take medicine out even for sick children). Since August 1989, however, regulations (56, get the sense, and change the word to fit the passage) have prohibited the export of consumer goods(57) . Now check-in time is three hours before departure rather than the usual two.(58 get the idea, and fit into the passage)　 This is to give customs officers extra time to decide how much of the workers’ baggage must be left behind.

Economic reforms (60) might have been expected to either improve the workers’ lot or send them home(61), as has happened with similar guest workers from the Third World (59) in Eastern Europe. Instead, the failed reforms have ensured the worst of all possible worlds. Collapsing industry(62, extract the idea, and fit into the passage)   throughout Russia needs their cheap labour (45) more than ever, while increasingly– disgruntled Russians are turning on the migrants.

This continuing need for migrant labour calls into question the commitment to even basic reforms. As a leading Russian magazine, Rabotnitsa, puts it, “It is much easier for a manager to sign a requisition for more Vietnamese women than to set about the complicated issue of mechanizing this factory.” And the daily Rabochave Tribuna reports that, far from doing without guest workers, the country is now import labour from China(63, change the part of speech). This time, without the presence of training(64).

(Freely adaped from “Hard Labour’, in the Guardian, 27June, 1991(43)