Inside 26-year journey of Ton Duc Thang Award: Labor creativity honored

The 26^th Ton Duc Thang Award in 2026 are officially presented on the occasion of President Ton Duc Thang’s 138^th birthday anniversary (August 20, 1888 – August 20, 2026).

Chairman Bui Thanh Nhan of the HCMC Labor Federation detailed the 26-year development of the meaningful awards, aiming at discovering, fostering, and honoring highly creative laborers.

Over 26 years, the Ton Duc Thang Award has demonstrated how the creative resources embedded within the workforce of workers, engineers, and everyday laborers in HCMC are remarkably abundant. What is truly precious is that numerous initiatives do not stem from grandiose ideas. Rather, they’re organically forged from daily tasks and specific issues encountered across the production, engineering, services, education, and healthcare sectors.

Armed with practical experience and a drive for exploration, workers have steadily transformed those raw concepts into highly applicable solutions. These solutions significantly boost productivity, elevate quality, and maximize work efficiency, ultimately generating pragmatic value for both their units and society as a whole.

This year, the review council received 36 dossiers spanning various fields. These include groundbreaking initiatives that generated tens of billions of dong in profits, contributing to skyrocketing productivity and rigorously training numerous workers to upskill their craft. However, officials firmly believe that this immense resource remains overwhelmingly vast and has not yet been fully tapped.

Consequently, in this new phase, the Trade Union will not just stop at seeking out and honoring exceptional individuals. Instead, they’ll proactively step up to identify folks who possess the inherent capability to solve the gritty, real-world puzzles faced by corporate enterprises.

Chairman Bui Thanh Nhan explained the launch of the “Excellent labor, high productivity, good income” movement. He noted that if the movement remains superficial and lacks depth, it’ll be incredibly difficult to forge a long-lasting bond with the labor force. Therefore, they must use substantive efficiency as the ultimate yardstick, ensuring every single activity closely aligns with the practical demands of both workers and enterprises.

Productivity desperately needs to be viewed through a much more comprehensive lens. More importantly, hard-earned results must be tangibly translated into production and business efficiency. Consequently, the union genuinely wants to shift away from executing isolated emulation campaigns and transition toward a continuous, seamless process. This involves:

• Aggressively discovering initiatives;
• Actively supporting their refinement;
• Putting them into practical application;
• Rigorously measuring their efficiency;
• Tirelessly replicating the best models.

That is exactly the driving spirit behind the “Innovation – Productivity Enhancement – Income Growth” support program for the 2026-2031 period that the HCMC Labor Federation is currently constructing.

A remarkably novel aspect of this program is the establishment of the “HCMC Trade Union Initiative Bank,” providing robust support from initial idea formation through testing, refinement, and replication. Harsh reality dictates that genuinely brilliant initiatives exist that have not yet been developed to their fullest potential.

Everyday workers often face practical bottlenecks:

• Possessing stellar ideas but lacking crucial funding for testing;
• Having viable solutions without access to consulting experts;
• Boasting solid results but not knowing how to precisely quantify profitable values or finalize paperwork for widespread replication.

If the Trade Union merely stands at the end of the pipeline strictly to hand out rewards, they could miss an astronomical number of high-potential ideas. Accordingly, the fully digitized bank is strategically oriented to be much more than a mere storage repository. It is meticulously designed as a comprehensive system capable of receiving, categorizing, rigorously evaluating, tracking, and seamlessly connecting highly applicable initiatives.

A single initiative can undoubtedly help an enterprise generate billions of dong in profits, but what everyday laborers genuinely care about is whether that immense value actually trickles back down to them. Elevating productivity and aggressively boosting workers’ incomes are by no means diametrically opposed objectives.

Any initiative helping a business save massive amounts of money is profoundly worthy of respect. But it’s also essential to acutely focus on how the brilliant minds behind these initiatives are officially recognized, what concrete opportunities they receive to further hone their craft, and whether their take-home pay actually sees tangible improvements.

The Trade Union bears the heavy responsibility of representing, dialoguing, and fiercely negotiating to guarantee that the legitimate rights and vested interests of workers are meticulously prioritized. This must function as an intertwined chain, wherein the everyday laborer is concurrently the creative mastermind and the rightful beneficiary.

Looking ahead to 2031, the Ton Duc Thang Award is highly expected to catalyze noticeably sharper shifts regarding the sheer quality of human resources, overall labor productivity, and practical manufacturing efficiency across HCMC. Authorities must relentlessly forge a distinct class of modern workers who boast impeccable craftsmanship, profound intellect, sharp digital skills, the capacity to master novel technologies, and an innovative mindset.