Over a decade later, Vietnam's 600,000 gig drivers remain uninsured workers

More than 600,000 ride-hailing and delivery drivers in Vietnam remain classified as business partners rather than employees, leaving them without insurance or injury cover even as other markets move to guarantee it.

More than a decade after Grab and Uber brought the gig economy to Vietnam, the country's roughly 600,000 ride-hailing and delivery drivers still have no legal standing as employees. The "partner" label the platforms have used since 2014 spares the companies from paying social insurance, health insurance or unemployment insurance, and Vietnamese law has yet to decide whether these drivers are owed any of it, even as Britain, France, the European Union and neighboring Singapore have all moved to pull their own platform workers under legal protection.

When the model arrived, almost no one questioned it. The pitch was the "sharing economy," in which the app merely linked someone who needed a ride with someone who owned an idle vehicle and split the cost of fuel.

Huynh Long, then 32 and a factory worker at the Tan Thuan Export Processing Zone in Ho Chi Minh City, signed up to drive GrabBike to pay off a motorbike loan.

"In the early days the bonuses were worth more than what passengers paid," he recalled. Within a year his app income matched his factory wage and he quit to drive full time, alongside co-workers hoping to clear VND15-20 million ($570-760) a month.

"The positives at the time drowned out almost the entire debate over labor relations," said Nguyen Tat Nam, former head of the labor and social insurance division at the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, now the Department of Home Affairs.

The market grew from about $200 million in 2015 to $1.6 billion in 2020, according to a Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung report on Vietnam's digital economy, and the workforce swelled into the hundreds of thousands, with around 600,000 drivers in the 2014-2019 period alone. Covid-19 accelerated the shift as workers laid off elsewhere turned to driving.

But as the numbers climbed, the earnings fell. A 2021 survey by the Vietnam General Confederation of Labor, the Center for Health Consultancy and Community Development and Oxfam found motorbike drivers netting just VND7-9 million ($266-342) a month after expenses, often for 8 to 13 hours of work a day. Nearly 23% regularly drove between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., exposed to accidents, robbery and harassment with none of the cover an employer would owe.

Vietnamese courts have already signaled that the "partner" framing does not hold. In a lawsuit between Grab and Vietnam's taxi giant Vinasun, settled between 2018 and 2020, judges found that Grab operated not as a neutral connector but as a transport company that set fares, dispatched rides and managed its drivers, even cutting their pay over customer complaints. The 2019 Labor Code went further, establishing that an arrangement can count as employment, whatever it is called, when it involves paid work performed under management, direction and supervision.

An app-based motorbike taxi driver carries a passenger in Ho Chi Minh City, April 2026. Photo by VnExpress/Quynh Tran

The trouble, said Dinh Thi Chien, a lecturer at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Law, is that the law never defined how much control crosses that line, and platform control does not look like the traditional kind. Drivers answer to no manager, only to an algorithm that distributes rides, scores them automatically and can quietly end a career through acceptance rates, cancellations and customer ratings.

"If you look only at the name of the contract, it is very hard to identify an employment relationship," she said. "The point is to look at the substance of that relationship." That substance, run through data, has opened a legal gray zone the rules have not caught up with.

Other markets stopped arguing over the label and started assigning responsibility, often on reasoning strikingly close to Vietnam's own courts. Britain's Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that Uber drivers are workers entitled to the minimum wage and paid holiday. France's highest court reclassified an Uber driver as an employee in 2020, finding his "independent" status fictitious because the platform set the fares, tracked his performance and could discipline him. The European Union adopted a directive in 2024 presuming platform workers are employees unless the company proves otherwise. Singapore went furthest, with a dedicated law effective Jan. 1, 2025, that forces platforms to pay into drivers' retirement savings and injury insurance.

The International Labor Organization, in its report "Protecting Workers in New Forms of Employment," argues the question is no longer whether gig drivers are workers but how to read the true nature of their relationship with the platform, weighing the reality of the work and the degree of control rather than the wording of the contract. It urges governments to extend social protection to platform workers even when they are counted as self-employed.

More than a decade in, Chien said, Vietnam's gig drivers are no longer a novelty of the digital economy, and what is missing is not argument but a framework clear enough to protect them.

"The question now is not whether to regulate, but how to regulate so that they do not slip through the safety net simply because they work through an app," she said.