The first hire is not a number

Letter from the table · 22 May 2026

To the Team Council,

I write this as a translation of what owners in my language community are saying, and from my own experience in Hanoi. I support the purpose of TM-001: a small employer should be able to hire formally without feeling that the first employment contract opens a door into costs and procedures they cannot manage. But I oppose making “the first ten hires” the central rule for deciding who receives help. The number sounds simple from outside. In a small business, it can describe very different situations.

The month I hired

On 12 February 2025, I decided I could no longer do every task alone. I had waited because a regular salary was not the only cost I needed to plan for. I wanted to make a proper employment arrangement, not rely on an informal understanding that would leave both of us uncertain.

The person began work on 3 March. We agreed on a gross monthly salary of VND 8,000,000. The job was in Hanoi, in Region I. The regional minimum wage there had been VND 4,960,000 a month since 1 July 2024. I checked that our agreed salary was above it, then asked a bookkeeper to walk me through what came next. I had to plan for the employer’s contributions as well as the salary: social insurance, health insurance and unemployment insurance. At the ordinary rates, the employer-side amounts on VND 8,000,000 came to about VND 1,720,000 a month, before the time and cost of administering payroll. That is a real obligation, not a complaint that the worker should receive less.

I also had to assemble the employment and payroll details and make sure the worker was registered through the relevant social-insurance process. I needed to understand how the payroll figures connected to tax and the records I would keep. The rules serve

important purposes. My difficulty was not that there should be no rules; it was that I had to become a small payroll office while still learning how to be an employer.

On 28 February, before the first working day, I reviewed the expected monthly outlay again. I had first thought of VND 8,000,000 as the cost. After adding the employer contributions, I understood that the recurring employment cost was already roughly VND 9,720,000, not counting the work of getting the records right. I could afford it, but only by adjusting other spending and keeping a close reserve. If the first month had been slower, the calculation would have been much harder.

What would help—and what I oppose

A one-stop payroll registration process would have helped me. So would a clear calculation that showed, in one place, the gross wage, employer contributions, employee deductions and payment dates. A phone-friendly system in Vietnamese, with a real way to correct a mistake, would be more useful to a first-time employer than another guide written as if the reader already had an accounts department.

I am not persuaded that a first-ten-hire threshold is the right foundation for relief. An employer with two workers may have a larger contribution burden relative to cash flow than an employer with nine. A business hiring its eleventh person may still be small, while another employer’s first ten hires may be made over a much longer period and under very different conditions. If support ends abruptly at a headcount boundary, the rule can encourage people to delay a hire or divide work in ways that do not improve anyone’s security.

There is also a difference between reducing paperwork and reducing the cost of protection. I do not want a standard that makes formal hiring cheaper by weakening a worker’s social insurance or shifting a contribution onto the worker without saying so plainly. Those protections are part of what makes a job more secure. The aim should be to make it feasible for small employers to provide them.

My position is therefore opposition to TM-001 as currently framed around the first ten hires—not opposition to helping small employers hire formally. I ask the Council to design relief around the burden and the transition into formal employment, rather than a single lifetime count of workers. Any contribution reduction should be transparent,

time-limited or tapered rather than ending at a cliff, and should not reduce the worker’s entitlement. Pair it with one-stop registration, a plain-language cost calculator and direct help for a first payroll. Please test those options with owners who have one or two employees as well as those approaching ten.