Work and Family Life among Migrant Factory Workers in China and Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Through on-site interviewing, a comparative study has been carried out about migrant factory workers in industrialised parts of China’s Guangdong province and in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City. Even though China and Vietnam possess similar legacies of socialist transformation and have household registration regulations that restrict rural migrants’ access to urban social services and impede their settlement in cities, there exist marked differences in Guangdong and Ho Chi Minh City in migration patterns, factory work conditions and migrant worker family livelihoods. In particular, migrant families in Ho Chi Minh City largely stay intact and tend to settle there permanently, while married migrant workers in Guangdong normally need to split up their families and remain trapped in circular rural–urban migration. As shall be seen, the national and local governments play important roles in determining the inclusion or exclusion of migrants from urban life, the wages they are paid and their standard of living and, most important of all, their children’s access to education. Each of the two countries’ differences in implementing policies is examined and comparatively analysed.

KEYWORDS:

• Vietnam
• China
• migrant workers
• families
• urbanisation
• education

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for Hong Kong Polytechnic University research funding and for a grant from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (no. PolyU 156068/18H). The authors thank the Journal of Contemporary Asia’s anonymous referees, Nguyen Nu Nguyet Anh, Anita Chan, Chris K. C. Chan, Elaine Hui and Wang Hongzen for participation in collaborative research and for their critiques of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Most of China’s construction workers at urban sites are migrant workers from the countryside. It is common for them to live inside the construction site. Once a ceiling is in place, workers often set up make-shift sleeping quarters inside the building they are constructing. On the working and living conditions of these construction workers, and the ways they are often cheated out of their wages, see Pun and Lu (2010b) and Swider (2015).

2. Interviewing during those years showed that companies sometimes paid a slightly higher hourly rate for overtime work, but very often no higher, despite a legal stipulation that overtime work was to be paid at one and a half times the normal rate, and double for weekends.

3. This is due in part to the support provided by provincial trade unions in Vietnam to workers’ labour protests, contrary to the anti-worker actions of local Chinese unions (see Chan 2020).

4. Figure 2 shows that the effects of Vietnam’s high inflation rate began to be evident during 2006–2007, seen in a widening gap between the legal minimum wage and the legal minimum wage adjusted for inflation. The surge in strikes extended across the following few years of high inflation before the strike wake finally subsided.

5. Surveys in China close to a decade ago indicated that some 58 million children, 47 million spouses, and 45 million elderly in the countryside had been left behind by migrant workers. (Ye et al. 2013, 1119).

6. There are some exceptions to this pattern. In 2016, the chair of the enterprise-level trade union in a Taiwanese-owned shoe factory in Ho Chi Minh City said during an interview that in the industrial area where his factory is located, the Vietnamese government was building dormitories to house unmarried migrant workers labouring in foreign-invested factories.

7. In most provinces, rural parents could have one son, and if the first birth was a girl the parents were allowed a second child. Population control programmes could not be as rigorously enforced as they were for the urban populace, and migrant workers who gave birth to a son often also have a younger child.

8. This split-household arrangement is a class-specific strategy practiced by working-class migrant families. In fieldwork in Guangdong it became evident that middle-class migrant families are better able to plan how to integrate their children, such as keeping records of their contributions to social insurance and the other eligibility requirements for school admission. As middle-class migrants usually work in stable professional or service sectors and have better access to government information, getting these records is much easier than for working-class migrants, many of whom periodically shift employers.

9. Although enrolment rates decrease as the level of education rises, in the World Bank’s 2015 survey 88% of children with temporary registration were able to enrol in a junior high school (World Bank and Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences 2016, 27).