Is
Vietnam’s market-driven economic success starting
to come undone? More than 20,000 Vietnamese
workers went on strike demanding a 20% increase to
their US$59 monthly salaries on Monday at a
Taiwanese-owned factory that makes shoes for US
apparel giant Nike. As of Friday, the plant
remained closed after a scuffle broke out after
the two-day work stoppage.
The protest
represents the latest in a surge of factory labor
strikes in Vietnam, the majority of which have
targeted the same foreign-invested companies the
Communist Party-led government has in recent years
endeavored to attract in support of its
export-oriented reform drive.
The large
scale of the strike at the Nike-affiliated factory
represents perhaps the starkest indication yet
that the Communist Party’s historical promotion of
mass revolutionary
movements against foreign
exploitation is beginning to undermine badly its
new capitalist gambit. Last year at least 541
labor strikes were held across the country, mostly
at foreign-invested factories and involving an
estimated 350,000 workers.
Those protests
have clearly been fueled by a growing sense of
economic injustice among factory workers and are
now being compounded by galloping inflation rates.
Consumer price inflation was 19.4% year on year in
March, the biggest jump in over 13 years. Many
economists are now starting to revised down their
previously bullish economic growth forecasts for
2008.
That’s put the Communist Party-led
government in an increasingly tight spot. Much of
the government’s political legitimacy rests with
its ability to manage and maintain fast economic
growth. Market reforms and a new official openness
to foreign investment have since 2000 contributed
to annual average GDP growth of 7%, which has
helped to lift many Vietnamese households out of
poverty and given rise to a new and growing
urban-based middle class.
At the same
time, many low-wage workers have benefited only
marginally from leaving the countryside and taking
up factory work in industrializing urban areas.
Because Vietnam’s authoritarian political system
provides no outlets for popular challenge,
suggestion or criticism of government policies,
the strikes have been organized to influence state
labor policies.
Not since French colonial
rule have labor strikes been so widespread or such
a prominent part of everyday politics in Vietnam.
According to Phan An, director of Ho Chi Minh
City’s department of labor, war invalids and
social affairs, there have been more than 1,000
labor strikes in the southern commercial city
since 1998. He said that around 98% of those
protests were technically illegal and that most
occurred at foreign-invested companies.
Indeed, almost none of the strikes were
declared through a legal process, indication of
the weak rule of law foundations in Vietnam’s
highly repressed political and social contexts. In
2005, the government attempted to better formalize
labor codes and make them more efficient in terms
of arbitration and implementation.
That
concession was in reaction to wave of labor
strikes that forced the government to increase the
minimum wage at foreign-invested factories by
nearly 40% - much to the chagrin of foreign
investors who located in Vietnam for the cheap
labor. Many workers at foreign factories are
required to work up to 1,000 hours overtime a
year, often in poor, if not abysmal, working
conditions.
That oddly stales in
comparison with their public sector colleagues,
where the minimum wage at state-owned enterprises
(SOEs) is 35% higher and 134% higher for newly
skilled employees. Public workers also share in
SOE profits through a bonus system and welfare
funds. Although low in global terms, the
US$200-250 per month workers earn on average at
state-owned cement plants, and the US$120-180 paid
by government paper mills, are still considerably
higher than the US$89 workers at the strike-hit
Taiwan-owned factory pays its Nike
apparel-producing workers.
The wage
differential has provided an ideological buffer
for the Communist Party, in that lower-paying
foreign invested firms are more widely viewed as
exploiting workers than their state-owned
counterparts. That ideological commitment also
helps to explain why the government has so far
wholly failed to crack down on labor unrest - even
when the strikes have hit the big name Western
manufacturers and producers the country has
assiduously tried to lure to Vietnam through road
shows and investment incentives. The Vietnamese
judiciary, widely viewed as a government puppet
for politically-oriented cases, has been highly
sympathetic to labor demands.
With
advocacy politics severely constrained in Vietnam,
labor strikes are gradually starting to transform
mainstream politics by giving a voice to people
outside of Communist Party-recognized
organizations. The strikes are perhaps best
contextualized historically by Australian National
University academic Benedict Kerkvliet’s previous
observation on how Vietnamese peasants have
managed to press their demands on government.
Since the 1960s, the government was
pressured informally and indirectly by agrarians
to abandon collective farming and allow for more
individual family farming instead. Those pressures
eventually led to the collapse of Vietnam’s
collective farming experiment "without social
upheaval, without violence, without a change in
government, without even organized opposition",
Kerkvliet noted.
Ideological
arbitration Similarly, perhaps, party
leaders have at least until now allowed workers to
air their grievances, so long as they are aimed at
foreign-invested companies and not the party
itself. That has until now conveniently put the
government in the role of arbiter, where it
strives to balance its ideological pledge to
uplift the masses while assuring foreign investors
that worker demands will only be allowed to go so
far - that means maintaining state-enforced
minimum wages rates that are still lower than in
neighboring China.
That investor-labor
balance however is becoming increasingly hard to
strike, and some moves indicate that the
authorities may soon take a harder line against
striking workers. In recent weeks, Prime Minister
Nguyen Tan Dung abandoned market principles and
called for emergency measures to contain
inflation, including price caps until June for
such essential goods and services such as water,
electricity, petrol, medicines, hospital fees and
basic transportation services.
At the same
time, in a clear concession to foreign investors,
the government is also drafting a decree that will
make workers responsible for employer costs in
dealing with strikes and will give the state the
authority to force workers back to factory lines
if deemed in the national interest. If
implemented, some labor analysts believe, these
actions could soon put workers and the government
on a collision course.
Unlike the two
resistance wars that were inspired by a future
vision of peaceful equilibrium, the current doi
moi market reform drive is one of economic
necessity and is proving to have several
unexpected and unpredictable results. That’s
prompted Communist Party leaders to make further
revisions and reinterpretations of its original
socialist path.
The new generation of
economic reform-minded party leaders remains
confident that they can co-opt new capitalist
concepts such as private ownership while adhering
to Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh thought as the
country’s ideological foundation.
But as
the labor strikes indicate, the contradictions are
increasingly stark - including, for instance,
recent government approval to a foreign investor
to market and design a Ho Chi Minh golf trail in
central Vietnam. They are becoming even starker as
inflation eats into recent poverty alleviation
gains.
The first major peasant protest
against colonial rule in Vietnam, in 1908, was
motivated by French administrators’ unwillingness
to modify its strict and highly exploitative labor
codes. This failure was later exploited by
communist rebels, who effectively equated
colonialism with slavery. Today’s communist party
risks similar criticism, as top party cadres
confiscate peasant lands, buy vacation homes and
play golf during lunch breaks with Western
corporate executives.
Ho Chi Minh once
asked, "What has France done so as to earn our
gratitude?" Now a new generation of worker
activists, at least in private, is starting to ask
the same question with a twist: what has the
Communist Party government done so as to earn our
gratitude? Or, as reputable socialist historian
Nguyen Khac Vien, puts it: "Will this integration
[of capitalism and socialism] be successful or
will it lead to new disappointments and
catastrophes?"
So far the broad verdict is
mixed, but a growing number of workers are clearly
disappointed with their lot in the new capitalist
order. Given Vietnam’s strong national ideals of
community spirit and collective action, against
both foreign and local exploitation, it is not
surprising to see young, non-party-affiliated
Vietnamese taking up the cause of landless
laborers and striking workers.
That
includes the young individuals who in October 2006
founded the United Workers-Farmers Organization
and in December last year were charged and
sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison on
criminal charges of "abusing democracy and
freedoms to infringe on the interests of the
state, the legitimate rights and interests of
organizations and citizens."
As this
week’s 20,000-strong labor strike indicates, there
are plenty more like-minded workers and activists
willing to fight for social and economic justice.
Whether the Communist Party moves to suppress or
enfranchise this growing movement, expressed for
now in labor strikes but in future possibly
calling for more democratic rights, could be the
difference between the success or failure of the
government’s now straining market reform program.
Long
S Le is the director of international
initiatives for the Global Studies Program and
also a lecturer of Vietnamese studies at the
University of Houston in the United States.
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