Vietnam’s and China’s Diverging Industrial Relations Systems: Cases of Path Dependency

ABSTRACT

This article explains why Vietnam and China, one-party states that allow only one official trade union, are traversing different paths in their trade unions’ institutional structures, the state’s and trade union’s attitudes towards strikes, their willingness to allow independent trade unions and willingness to engage with the international labour union movement. These will be examined in terms of the path dependency of their recent histories, in which changes have been incremental on a path laid down by pre-existing entrenched institutions, until each national system no longer operated properly and new contingencies obliged the leadership to revamp the system. As a consequence of China’s and Vietnam’s divergent path dependencies, when external contingencies finally forced institutional change, countries have veered onto divergent trajectories – the Trans-Pacific Partnership energising Vietnam to debate the acceptance of autonomous trade unions, while Xi Jinping in China has intensified Party control over industrial relations.

KEY WORDS:

• Vietnam
• China
• industrial relations
• Trans-Pacific Partnership
• path dependency

Postscript

On 14 June 2019 all of the deputies present at a National Assembly session voted yes to the ratification of the ILO Convention 87 on the right to organise independent unions and collective bargaining. https://www.ilo.org/hanoi/Informationresources/Publicinformation/newsitems/WCMS_710542/lang--en/index.htm

Acknowledgments

The research project that resulted in this article has six collaborators – Chris Chan (City University of Hong Kong), Hongzen Wang (Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan), Kaxton Siu (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Elaine Hui (Pennsylvania State University), Jonathan Unger (Australian National University) and myself. Thanks are due to the staff of APHEDA and FES in Hanoi for their help and thanks also to the two referees and my collaborators for their useful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Using this analytical method, Estlund (2017) wrote an excellent book comparing the industrial relations systems of China and the USA, which surprisingly reveals many shared commonalities while disclaiming their uniqueness. Also see Homer (2009) for another comparative study.

2. There is a useful literature on these transformations. See, for example, Chan, Kerkvliet, and Unger (1999); Sidel (2008); Pringle and Clarke (2011); Nguyen (2016); and Malesky, Abrami, and Zheng (2011).

3. This has been described in several publications, including: Clarke, Lee, and Do (2007), Kerkvliet (2011, 160–210), Chan (2011), Do and Broek (2013), Siu and Chan (2015), Däubler (2015, 93–108), and Nguyen (2016, 2017a).

4. I am aware of only one similar case in China, in which a reformist trade union chair of Guangzhou city hired a store-level Walmart trade union chair after he was fired by Walmart for publicly and rebelliously refusing to sign a Walmart-dictated collective agreement that was endorsed by the ACFTU (Chan 2015, 213).

5. This excerpt is taken from a transcript recorded by the activist on her phone on September 18, 2016.

6. TUSSOs are different from labour NGOs in that they are either branches or affiliates of established political or trade union institutions.

7. This sentence is based on two and half decades of my conversations with relevant officers of Australian, Canadian, American, European and other countries’ trade unions, labour-related organisations and international foundations and agencies. For a brief history of the American trade unions’ relationship with the ACFTU, see Quan (2017).

8. This information was provided by an APHEDA staff member who works closely with the VGCL, in a 2017 email.

9. After President Trump withdrew the USA from the negotiated TPP, it seemed the contingency factor had disappeared. But within a few months it was replaced by another contingency – the European Union-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement. The EUVFTA has lesser enforcement mechanisms than the proposed TPP. Nonetheless it required recognition of freedom of association (Tran, Bair, and Werner 2017).

Additional information

Funding

The author thanks the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong for financial support to this research (CityU 11616115, Comparing Labour Activism and Workplace Relations in China and Vietnam: The Role of Market, State and Civil Society).