Abstract
This chapter sets the background for the study of labour law and labour resistance in Vietnam as a transitional economy. It outlines important changes in labour relations and discusses structural factors underpinning the prevalence of labour resistance following industrial transition in Vietnam. Drawing from political economy and rightful resistance literature, the chapter examines different views concerning the role of legal institutions in advancing labour rights and factory workers’ actions to protect those rights. Yet there has been little in-depth analysis in existing literature as to how workers perceive their rights in relation to the labour law, and whether and how values embedded in law underpin their claims and ideals of justice. The chapter moves on to discuss the conceptual framework used in this book, adopted from socio-legal studies, which allows for a nuanced understanding of the intersection between law and other social norms and institutions in shaping labour resistance in Vietnam.
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Notes
- 1.
Foreign enterprises account for 2.7 per cent of all enterprises in Vietnam in 2015, dropping from 3.9 per cent in 2000 (General Statistics Office 2017a). However, registered foreign capital has increased over the year, jumping from US $6.84 million to $24.1 million from 2005 to 2015, despite suffering a significant fall after 2008 following the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis (General Statistics Office 2017b). The total disbursed foreign capital has seen a more stabilising trend since 2008, ranging from US $10 to $14 million each year.
- 2.
Government of Vietnam (2009). Decree 13/NQ-CP on the directions and measures to attract and manage foreign direct investment in the future.
- 3.
See Chan and Norlund (1998) for a comprehensive discussion of Chinese and Vietnamese labour regimes.
- 4.
James Scott’s moral economy framework (1976), which traces the values that shape social relationships and inform understandings of justice in pre-capitalist peasant society, has been referred to occasionally in analyses of labour resistance in China and Vietnam. For Scott, subsistence needs are a fundamental right of agrarian societies and infringement of this right has been a major cause of peasant resistance in times of crisis (Scott 1976, pp. 6–10). Having their subsistence needs fulfilled becomes a benchmark for peasants to judge whether the state and landlords are treating them in an ethical or exploitative manner.
- 5.
I use the term ‘capitalist’ here to refer to a model of development in which the state allows and facilitates the growth of private capital. I note, however, that Vietnam in particular still holds on to socialist ideology. The proclaimed ‘socialist-oriented market economy’ (kinh tế thị trướng định hướng xã hội chủ nghĩa) is a ‘multi-sectoral commodity economy that functions according to market principles and follows the management of the State under the leadership of the Communist Party’ (Central Committee of the CPV 2011).
- 6.
In Vietnam, the saying ‘the king’s edict stops at the village gates’ (phép vua thua lệ làng) (Wells-Dang 2014, p. 162) is often quoted by legal scholars to illustrate the dominance of local social values over new state laws, which are seen as transplants of global standards.
- 7.
An offshoot of the law and society movement in the USA, socio-legal research has moved beyond legal studies of texts and formal law-making processes and shed light on the relevance of law in individuals’ pursuit of justice and social movements (Merry 1990; Ewick and Silbey 1992; McCann 1994; McCann and March 1996). This law and society intellectual movement emerged in the 1970s and originally centred on illuminating the gap between ‘law in the books’ and ‘law in action’ and uses ‘methods of behavioral science’ to examine how law matters in people’s approach to social problems (Liu 2015, p. 3).
- 8.
Other sources have also stressed the socio-economic disadvantages of migrant workers compared to local workers, which are mainly due to the household registration system (hộ khẩu) in Vietnam that ties a citizen’s one and only legal residence status to their household (Hoang 2011). Migrant workers thus face difficulty in accessing social services, such as public healthcare, childcare, and children’s schooling, at their destination provinces.
- 9.
My involvement in a strike that is deemed politically sensitive, if by chance discovered by the state’s civil security forces, might have caused trouble for the workers with whom I talked.
- 10.
Information on strikes, including the company’s name, the reasons and resolutions, the number of workers involved, the duration of strikes, was obtained from the upper-level and provincial unions.
- 11.
As will be discussed shortly, these core workers received training about the Labour Code and other labour laws and policies and were introduced to me by the Legal Aid Centre, which belongs to the provincial Labour Federation. Here I wish to reiterate John Gilliom’s note in his study on American welfare mothers, which emphasises the importance of obtaining ‘the level of trust necessary to undertake meaningful interviews’ (2001, p. 46) rather than the scientific representation of the sample. Interviews with mothers receiving welfare in his research were indeed conducted by two women who share the same social status and locality with his research participants (p. 45).
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Nguyen, T.P. (2019). Introduction. In: Workplace Justice. Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3116-9_1
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