Vietnam Wants to Bring Its Gig Workers Into the Social Safety Net

Vietnam has proposed extending mandatory social insurance coverage to online sellers and construction workers, two large groups that have historically operated outside formal labour protections. The move reflects a broader global pattern of governments trying to catch up with informal and platform-based work that has grown far faster than the laws meant to regulate it.

Across much of Southeast Asia, a huge share of the workforce operates in what's usually called the informal economy: jobs that exist and generate real income, but sit outside the formal registration, taxation, and benefits systems that most labour laws are actually built around. In Vietnam, this includes millions of construction workers, many of whom move between short-term projects without a single long-term employer, and a rapidly growing population of online sellers who run small businesses through social media and e-commerce platforms rather than traditional storefronts.

Both groups share a common problem. Because they don't fit neatly into the employer-employee relationship that most social insurance systems were designed around, they've largely been left out of mandatory coverage for things like healthcare, workplace injury compensation, and retirement contributions. As these forms of work have grown, that gap has become harder for the government to ignore.

Vietnam's proposal aims to extend **mandatory social insurance** specifically to online sellers and construction workers, formally bringing them into the same protective framework that covers traditional employees. For construction workers, this would mean insurance coverage that follows the worker across different projects and employers, rather than depending on any single company registering them, addressing a long-standing gap in an industry known for physically dangerous work and highly transient employment arrangements.

For online sellers, the logic is slightly different but just as significant. As e-commerce has exploded across Vietnam, a large number of people now earn a meaningful, sometimes primary, income through online sales, without technically being "employed" by anyone in the traditional sense. Bringing this group into mandatory social insurance would require building new mechanisms for collecting contributions from workers who don't have a conventional employer handling payroll deductions on their behalf, a genuinely tricky administrative challenge that other countries have also struggled with as they've attempted similar reforms.

Vietnam is far from alone in trying to solve this problem. Governments around the world have spent the past several years grappling with how to regulate work that platforms and informal arrangements have essentially created faster than labour law could keep up. China introduced a judicial rule this year making it illegal for employers and workers to mutually agree to skip social insurance contributions, closing a loophole that had let both sides avoid payments, often at the worker's long-term expense. Various countries have wrestled with similar questions specifically around gig and platform work, from food delivery riders to ride-share drivers, each testing different models for extending protections without collapsing the flexibility that makes this kind of work attractive to those doing it in the first place.

What makes Vietnam's approach notable is its focus on two very different but equally overlooked groups at once, rather than concentrating solely on app-based gig work, which tends to dominate this conversation globally. Construction work and online selling operate under very different conditions, and extending the same insurance framework to both suggests a broader ambition: not just patching one visible gap, but building a more comprehensive net that could eventually stretch to cover other informal sectors as well.

The proposal still needs to move through Vietnam's legislative process before becoming binding, and the practical challenge of actually collecting contributions from a highly dispersed, self-employed population shouldn't be underestimated. Enforcement, not just legislation, will determine whether this genuinely changes outcomes for millions of workers or ends up as a well-intentioned rule that's difficult to apply consistently in practice. But the direction of the policy fits a pattern increasingly visible worldwide: informal and platform work has grown too large for governments to keep treating it as an exception to the rules, rather than something the rules need to be rebuilt around.