HANOI - Two hundred Vietnamese workers were scheduled to depart for South Korea on July 21 under the Employment Permit System.
Vietnam’s Center of Overseas Labour, an agency under the Ministry of Home Affairs, published the departure announcement and an accompanying official worker list. The 10-page document contains 178 workers in manufacturing, 21 in agriculture and one in forestry.
Manufacturing accounted for 89% of the cohort, reflecting the concentration of South Korea’s E-9 foreign-worker intake in industrial employment.
South Korea set its overall E-9 quota at 80,000 workers for 2026. The total comprises 70,000 sector-specific places and 10,000 flexible places that may be distributed in response to unexpected changes in labour demand. Manufacturing received 50,000 places, while agriculture and livestock received 10,000.
Industrial employment also dominated South Korea’s second-quarter EPS selection plan. Korean authorities expected to select 15,774 workers from 16 sending countries, including 11,275 for manufacturing, shipbuilding and mining.
Agriculture received 2,382 places, fisheries 1,485, construction 492 and services 140. Those figures cover the wider multinational selection round, not only Vietnamese workers.
The EPS programme allows South Korean employers facing domestic recruitment shortages to hire foreign workers through government-managed channels. Vietnamese candidates must pass Korean-language testing and a skills and competency assessment before they can enter the recruitment process.
Vietnamese labour mobility in Northeast Asia also extends to Japan. Japanese employers reported 605,906 Vietnamese workers as of October 31, 2025, making Vietnamese nationals the country’s largest foreign-worker group. They accounted for 23.6% of Japan’s record 2,571,037 foreign workers.
