Vietnam. Ties that bind: Cultural identity, class, and law in Vietnam's labour resistance By Trần Ngọc Angie Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publication, 2013. Pp. 340. Maps, Appendix, Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

Ties that bind: Cultural identity, class, and law in Vietnam's labour resistance By TRAN NGOC ANGIE Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publication, 2013. Pp. 340. Maps, Appendix, Bibliography, Index. Tran's monograph Ties that bind: Cultural identity, class, and law in Vietnam's labour resistance is a theoretically grounded analysis of labour resistance in Vietnam from the French colonial period to the current era of accelerated globalisation. Data sources include publications on French-colonial-period labour unrest, newspapers in the past six decades, and 41 interviews, mainly in southern Vietnam, with workers, labour resistance organisers, reporters, and a few enterprise managers/owners and state and union officials. The examined forms of resistance range from public denunciation of labour exploitation and labour regulation/contract violations, to work stoppages and strikes. The resistance can be of the Polanyi-type, based on 'the need to protect social substances imperiled by the self-regulating market' (p. 8), and taking the form of a fight 'against labour commodification for human dignity, justice, and self-preservation' (ibid.). Or the resistance can be of the Marxist type, 'based on class, and on the fight against capitalist exploitation for better wages and other labour rights' (ibid). Or the resistance can combine both types. In Ties that bind capitalists and management are portrayed as highly exploitative. Tran also suggests that the current Vietnamese state, despite its socialist rhetoric, has tried to control labour unrest in order to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and that its executive and judicial branches in numerous cases have sided with foreign and domestic capital. For example, from 1999 to 2006, despite the cumulative inflation rate of 35 per cent, the Vietnamese state did not adjust the minimum wage in the foreign sector, thus allowing the exploitation of Vietnamese workers by foreign capitalists. The minimum wage was also considerably lower in the domestic sector than in the foreign sector, thus allowing the exploitation of workers by domestic capital. Enterprise-based union leaders tend not to support work stoppages or strikes because they act in accordance with state guidelines and because they receive their union salaries from enterprise management. Through its ho khau (household registration) system, the current Vietnamese state erects institutional barriers against migrant workers who constitute a significant part of contemporary industrial labour in Vietnam. Tran suggests that this has led to higher rent and utility rates for migrant workers, as well as educational disadvantages for their children (pp. 190ff.). Courts have either ruled in favour of capital and against Vietnamese labourers, or caused considerable delay in rulings, partly by sending cases from one court to another. In Ties that bind workers' lives in contemporary Vietnam are portrayed as quite bleak, necessitating considerable overtime work in order to make up for non-livable wages. However, Tran also argues that the current Vietnamese state is not monolithic. Labour-union newspapers, despite being controlled by the state, have published many stories on workers' hardships, labour exploitation and law/contract violation by management, as well as workers' denunciations of law/contract violation. Following James Scott in his book Domination and the arts of resistance, Tran argues that Vietnamese workers neither consent nor resign to their exploitation. She suggests that cultural identity (i.e., based on religion, gender, birthplace, ethnicity, and nationality) constitutes a very important basis for relations among workers, and in quite a number of cases, serves as a basis for labour mobilisation. Tran suggests that class consciousness, instead of being a prerequisite for labour resistance, may emerge in the process of resistance. Ties that bind thus argues against the dominant perspective in Marxist analyses that strong cultural and ethnic identities lead to labour fragmentation or division, and hinder collective action. …