Once more, with all respect, I urge the leaders of all state agencies in the province to promptly intervene to save our lives. We are genuine employees who have no rights, lack equality, and experience a lot of coercion by the company.
This desperate plea comes from Mrs NguyĂȘn who has worked for six years in a garment company in Äá»ng Nai Province. She lodged a complaint and petition against the company management after perceived legal violations and unfair treatment. Mrs NguyĂȘn exhausted her legal arguments accusing the management of illegal wage policies and a lack of transparency in employeesâ bonus payments. This extract from one of NguyĂȘnâs complaint letters is similar to the kind of rightful claims brought against the abusive power of political and economic elites in authoritarian regimes (OâBrien and Li 2006, pp. 2â3). In making these claims, resisters exhibit a consciousness of their legal rights as well as knowledge of appropriate state law and other normative reasoning to mobilise popular support and demand justice. Similar to many other factory workers in Vietnam, NguyĂȘn was abandoned by the trade union that purported to serve in the workersâ interests. For the past few decades after the country opening its door to private and foreign investment, Vietnamese workersâ struggles to have their voices heard have been both enabled and stifled by the legal and political systems that are supposed to protect their rights. Workersâ accounts of resistance, both verbally and in writing, are underpinned by their consciousness of the socialist stateâs legal and political structures.
This book seeks to capture and comprehend factory workersâ resistance in Vietnam through an examination of their values and ideals of rights and justice. In particular, it investigates the extent to which values, language, and practices derived from the Labour Code, which is the key labour legislation in Vietnam, contribute to shaping workersâ views of workplace relations and providing justifications for their resistance. I understand resistance as acts that question or challenge power arrangements, authority, or practices of subjection, and focus on two forms of workersâ resistance: factory strikes and complaint writing and petitioning. In Vietnam, strikes, which are largely spontaneous and without union organisation, have been the most popular form of workersâ resistance. Strike demands have varied, but they all represent challenges to managersâ conduct and policies on the shop floor and, less frequently, state laws and policies (Tráș§n 2013, 2007). Other forms of resistance, such as petitioning and complaint writing, while not as vocal and explicitly confrontational as strikes, also deserve attention as they represent valuable testimonies of workersâ experiences on the shop floor in relation to labour law and their desires for justice. As will be shown in subsequent chapters of the book, these actions give expression to workersâ grievances and demands that have been either silenced or suppressed, and question or challenge existing practices by company and factory management and, at times, by state authorities.
The 1986 reform in Vietnam, known as Äá»i má»i (renovation), gave rise to the development of private domestic and foreign investment and marked a shift in labour relationships from a socialist to a market-based perspective. The Vietnamese Labour Code, passed in 1994 and most recently amended in 2012, laid the groundwork for the stateâs regulation of labour based on the rights and interests of employing parties within their contractual relationships. In practice, the evasions and violations of labour rights enshrined in the law have led to a rise in factory strikes that bypass the legal procedure for labour dispute resolution. More than 70 per cent of strikes from 1995 to 2010 occurred in foreign enterprises dominated by Taiwanese, Korean, Hong Kong, and Japanese investors (Tráș§n 2013, p. 200). Thus, despite making up less than 4 per cent of all registered businesses in Vietnam,1 foreign enterprises are central to the prevalence of labour unrest in the country. The government, meanwhile, has continued to promote the importance of attracting foreign investment; a government decree in 2009 includes strike prevention and labour dispute resolution as necessary measures to facilitate foreign-funded production activities.2 While strikes in state-owned enterprises are undoubtedly under-reported, the cultural alienation between foreign managers/supervisors and Vietnamese workers is an important factor in arousing and escalating shop floor tensions (Tráș§n 2013, p. 197).
The Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL) remains the only recognised trade union in Vietnam. It claims to represent the entire Vietnamese working class and serves under the agenda of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) in the interest of maintaining regime stability. Under the pressure for reform following the waves of factory strikes, the VGCL has exerted a greater voice in law and policy dialogues for the benefit of employees (Knutsen and Hansson 2010; Do and van den Broek 2013). There are also increasing efforts to enhance the bargaining capacity of company unions affiliated with the VGCL on the shop floors. However, these positions are often filled by management personnel, leaving the workers voiceless. These efforts have neither increased workersâ bargaining power nor addressed the persistent distrust between them and the organisation that claims to act in their interests.
The subject matter of this book relates and contributes to the broader literature on labour resistance in post-socialist countries of Vietnam and China. While not presenting a comparative study, it draws from works conducted in China which provide useful perspectives and insights into the case studies in the Vietnamese context. Both China and Vietnam have experienced transition from central planning to a market-based economic system, starting in late 1980s and 1990s, under the leadership of the ruling Communist Party and its socialist legacies. These countries have also reformed their labour law regime following market principles while recognising only one legitimate trade union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and the VGCL, respectively.3 The VGCL to date has had more institutional power than their China counterpart, at least in their capacity to participate in developing key labour policies at the national level (Quan 2015).
The brunt of economic transition in post-socialist Asia falls foremost upon the state workers, who became redundant following the restructuring or dismantling of state-owned enterprises. In the socialist era, employment was based on workersâ loyalty and obedience to their managers and the state in exchange for a modest income and guaranteed social welfare, rather than on legality and formal labour contracts (Hurst and OâBrien 2002, p. 357; Walder 1986). As economic reform put to rest the socialist stateâs promises of welfare and lifelong employment, these workers launched protests and lodged their petitions to call upon the state and management to uphold their moral obligations (Lee 2007; Chen 2000; Hurst and OâBrien 2002; Tráș§n 2013). Viewed from a moral economy perspective,4 the redundant workersâ sense of grief turned into vocal protests in particular when their minimum living needs were no longer secured and when they believed that managerial corruption had added to this situation (Chen 2000, pp. 45â48). Those state workers who demand their pensions also held the state and managers accountable for their now impoverished livelihoods (Hurst and OâBrien 2002). They acutely felt that a breach of reciprocal duties and a denial of the socialist contract had occurred when their pension was not paid in part or in full after all their years of service to the state enterprises.
The next wave of labour unrest was led by a new generation of migrant workers, who left their rural hometown to look for jobs and better incomes in growing urban and industrial areas. In both China and Vietnam, economic reform and integration into the global economy have produced a surge of growth in private domestic and foreign businesses, which are typically labour-intensive and export-oriented, and a high demand for manual, unskilled labour. As businesses have sought to maximise their profits and drive down labour costs, the new, mostly migrant working class, has been subject to exploitation and varying forms of managerial control on and off the shop floor (Chan 2001; Chan 2008; Pun 2005, 2016; Friedman and Lee 2010; Friedman 2014; Tráș§n 2013; Pun and Smith 2007). These workers, at the same time, lack the institutional capacity to organise and collectively bargain with the state and capital. Their experience of a perpetual cycle of exploitation, powerlessness, and desperation has led these workers to take illegal spontaneous action, mostly in the form of strikes and protests, to demand decent wages and working conditions. Since the Labour Code was introduced in Vietnam in 1994, factory strikes have continued to break out in large numbers each year: they climbed to a peak of 993 in 2011, then dropped to 601 in 2012 and 293 in 2014 (VGCL 2015). In China, while official statistics for strikes are unavailable, different sources have suggested that hundreds of thousands of labour disputes took place across the country from 1993 to 2010 (Elfstrom and Kuruvilla 2014, pp. 454â455). The prevalence of workersâ collective action against the law is a significant challenge to the legal regime that has endorsed a wide range of employeesâ rights in accordance with international labour conventions.
From a Marxist political economy perspective, state law is an aspect of the superstructure that controls and immiserates the workforce in the interests of the ruling and powerful classes. Law functions as a political and ideological tool to safeguard the capitalist mode of production and sustain its machine of labour exploitation (Steinberg 2010; Cotterrell 2006). In post-socialist China and Vietnam, the growing political alliance between the state and capital (especially foreign capital) in export-processing zones and industrial regions in the south has significantly constrained workersâ institutional power (Pun 2005, 2016; Nghiem 2006; Tráș§n 2013). Consequently, the promulgation of labour laws is rendered unfavourable to the workersâ interests and contributes little to protecting or advancing labour rights (Chan and Siu 2012; Chan 2008; Tráș§n 2013). In particular, while employees now in principle have extensive individual rights in accordance with international conventions, the lack of collective rights, such as the right to strike and ...