Dissident Labour Activism in Vietnam

Abstract

Scholars of Vietnam have studied different forms of labour resistance such as wildcat strikes, petitions, complaints, work stoppages, and boycotts, with which workers demand higher wages and pensions, overall better working conditions, and the implementation of workers’ rights. This article pays attention to the small, yet not negligible group of dissident labour activists, who are subjected to much harsher state repression compared to labour resistance in and around the workplace. This article asks: What makes dissident labour activism a (real or perceived) threat to the state? A common and widely accepted explanation refers to the nature of the demands of dissidents, which includes independent trade unions, democratisation, and regime change. This article digs deeper and finds that dissident labour activists function as agents of an emerging epistemological third space, which permits the revitalisation of hidden knowledges about labour rights, the reclamation of the silenced idea of independent trade unions and the co-existence of critique of the status quo and imagination of an alternative future, which together threaten to endanger the Communist Party of Vietnam’s political legitimacy and, by implication, capital utilisation.

Key Words:

• Dissidents
• epistemological third space
• independent labour activism
• protest
• social movements
• Vietnam

Acknowledgements

I thank Edmund Malesky, Angie Ngoc Tran, Jörg Wischermann, and Adam Fforde for reading and providing useful comments on earlier versions of this article. I also thank the Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) for inviting me to present my ideas on dissident labour activism at the SEAREG conference in December 2021 at Emory University.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In June 2020, a new independent group, the Vietnamese Independent Union (VIU, Nghiep doan doc lap Viet Nam) formed largely in response to the ratification of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the EU–Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) agreements. According to statements on its website, the group advocates for the establishment of “free unions in different industries.” The VIU declares that it is willing to “travel with the [official] Vietnamese General Confederation of Labour (VGCL) as a supplementing force to protect the employees, guarantee their full interests as the fellows in other member states of CPTPP and EVFTA” (VNunion.org 2021). According to Buckley (2020a), the VIU is open to building a “constructive relationship” with the VGCL. The description of the executive board provides no further details or information about the members but mentions that the group’s operational adviser Madame Nguyen Nguyen Binh used to be a lieutenant colonel of the Vietnamese People’s Army and is a daughter of Major General Nguyen Trong Vinh, a former Vietnamese ambassador to China (VNunion.org 2021). Yet, this group is still largely unknown and its prospective impact and genuine motivations remain to be seen.

2 Wildcat strikes are those strikes not organised by a union. Anner (2015, 27) emphasises that although wildcat strikes are successful short actions that result in “quick fixes,” they are necessarily repetitive as workers are required “to make the effort to strike again and again to meet basic demands.”

3 Convention 98 concerns the right to organise and collective bargaining, Convention 105 ratifies the abolition of forced labour, and Convention 87 agrees to the right of workers to establish independent organisations.

4 The government insisted that the terms “civil society” or “civil society organisations” not appear in the draft text of the agreement. In November 2019, 18 international civil society organisations wrote a letter to the EU Parliament calling for the free trade agreement to be postponed until Vietnam released all political prisoners and allowed for a free press (Deutsche Welle, January 17, 2020).

5 Clarke, Lee, and Chi (2007, 566) noted that the lack of understanding of the labour law is a problem also observable among workplace trade union officers and the management.