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Factory worker welfare and the commodification of labour in market socialist Vietnam: Debates on overtime work in the revised labour code
Abstract
State socialist Vietnam formally embraced market reforms in the mid-1980s, and since then advancing marketization under the undisrupted rule of the Communist party. As marketization deepens, the party state’s legitimacy continues to rest on socialist practices of governance, structures of feeling and visions of a class-free society. This political-economic context gives rise to struggles between market and socialist logics over the social question in an economy that now powers global production with raw material and cheap labour, much of which is migrant labour. This article highlights these struggles through an analysis of the public debates around the regulation of overtime work during the revision of the 1994 Labour Code by Vietnam’s National Assembly in 2019, which foresees limiting it to ensure workers’ well-being. While parties to the debate position themselves as pro-business or pro-workers, they all evoke socialist narratives of nation-building, solidarity and care while emphasizing the market ethos of competitiveness and productivity. In arguing for removing the limit, the pro-business camp highlights the workers’ responsibility to contribute to the competitiveness of the country and their employers by working overtime to make up for their low productivity. In contrast, the pro-worker camp pleads for limiting overtime work on the grounds of workers’ poor health and difficult family lives, portraying their sufferings as deserving compassion. Despite these contrasting justifications, both arguments are characterized by the assumption of self-responsibility as the mainstay of well-being and failure to acknowledge the deeper societal problems posed by the commodification of labour.
This special issue explores the intertwining reconfigurations of labour and welfare in the Global South by bringing together eight empirical studies of different national and transnational contexts and three commentaries. It asks how Global South people and states alike have come to prioritize market logics as guiding principles for welfare systems, moving away from collective risk-pooling towards individual responsibility, and how this reorientation is connected to the restructuring of labour. In this introduction to the special issue, we discuss the genealogies of the social question and review the growing academic discussion on the changing landscape of welfare in the Global South. We then underscore how the contemporary social question is predominantly framed in the terms of people’s capacity for market participation in the specific empirical contexts discussed by our authors. The framing of the social question as such, and the accompanying solutions to it, we argue, disregards politics, political economy and social justice at the cost of the more urgent social question that confronts the increasingly asymmetrical power relations between labour and capital.
China and Vietnam have a relatively low proportion of tax revenue contributing to public expenditure budget. Partly thanks to both governments' pro-growth priority, various forms of tax incentives are given to investors at the expense of tax revenue. Both countries, particularly China, increasingly rely on land rights transaction for public budgetary revenue. Social insurance premiums have also become an important component of fiscal revenue that underscores the policy design of universal social insurance schemes that require as many citizens' participation as possible. Although this has facilitated fast economic growth, China and Vietnam's public expenditure on social protection has been lagging behind most developed and developing economies, which constrains the scope and scale of social protection to citizens particularly the migrant workers. Instead, the costs of social protection in both countries, particularly for the working population, have been mostly shouldered by employers and employees, with increasing involvement of the market players.
China and Vietnam started market reforms about four decades ago, transforming the socialist labour regime into a market-oriented one. Labour legislations and regulations have been prolific in keeping up with the rapidly changing labour markets as both countries became part of global supply chains, especially in mass consumer goods manufacturing. In general, labour law offers greater space for labour association and collective bargaining in Vietnam than in China, although the Communist Party in both states keep a cautious and sceptical eye on independent labour unionisation. Both countries have made numerous labour legislations to regulate workplace conditions and labour dispute resolution, prioritising strategies for industrial mediation and legal channels to de-escalate labour grievance and pacify workers' unrest. Meanwhile, both China and Vietnam's legislatures have also formalised labour social protection toward integrated universal resident-based social protection. However, the problem of law enforcement is pervasive in all three areas above, despite the principle of "rule by law". Both countries' judiciary is dependent on central and local governments for financing and personnel appointment. With local officials' favourable treatment of businesses, the party state in both countries has considerable discretion in shaping the rights and welfare of workers through the legal system.
China and Vietnam are of the few countries that still implement household registration (hukou in Chinese and ho khau in Vietnamese). Regarded as one of the most important institutional mechanisms that underlie and sustain the profound rural-urban division in both countries, the systems record the mundane attributes of each individual of a household yet determine many of the vital aspects of the life, if not the fate, of citizens, particularly the rural-urban migrants. The change and continuity of these systems are closely associated with these countries' economic and social development, interacting with other processes such as industrialisation, liberalisation of the labour market, urbanisation, and rural development. Despite recent reforms, the household registration systems in both countries continue to shape migrant workers' ability to access welfare.
China and Vietnam have experienced waves of labour and welfare reform since both countries shifted to market socialism, pursuing a development model that depends on the labour of millions of rural–urban migrants in global factories. Their similar development trajectories are productive for theorizing the relationship between labour and welfare. This article conceptualises the two countries’ distinctive regime of migrant labour welfare as integral to a cycle of commodification that encompasses the overlapping processes of commodification, de-commodification and re-commodification of labour. After decades of collectivized labour under state socialism, the cycle begins with the commodification of labour through market reforms that led to mass rural–urban migration and the rise of the global factory alongside the dismantling of the former socialist welfare system. It was then followed by de-commodification attempts aimed at providing forms of social protection that offset the labour precarity caused by decades of labour market liberalisation. Despite the emergence of new universal welfare programs, the market has increasingly intruded into social protection, especially through financialized products targeted at the labouring masses who must compensate for the failings of public welfare programs. As such, these welfare regimes are undergoing a process of re-commodification in which the protection of labour is re-embedded into the market as a commodity to be consumed by the migrant workers with their meagre wages. The “cycle of commodification” offers an analytical framework to understand welfare regimes as a social and political field that keeps evolving in response to the changing global valuation of labour.
The idea of “social security” in the reform-era China characterises the changing collective perception of social questions and the shifting state’s responsibility for social provision. In the 1980s, when welfare retrenchment started in the name of “socialising welfare”, “social security” experienced substantive contestation. The first semantic turn took place during the 1990s when the state resumed its commitment to social policy. Thereafter, “social security” underwent yet another semantic shift to “social governance” under the Xi-Li leadership. “Social security” has become part of the grandiose, statist project to promote the rise of the Chinese nation on the global stage. Given the unchecked predominance of the state in all societal domains, the very nature of “social security” remains contested—and its meaning transitory—in the Chinese context.
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.
We make three arguments in this review of the literature on rural welfare governance in Vietnam and China. First, welfare restructuring in these countries has gone through two overlapping processes of contraction and expansion, underlined by changing politics of needs and shifting modes of governance since their shift from state to market socialism. Such politics are the outcome of the Communist party-state’s dual project of legitimation and control, as widespread social conflicts challenge its legitimacy. Secondly, the dislocations and inequalities induced by marketization have been coupled with greater involvement of a broad range of social actors in welfare provision. Thirdly, the rise of social protection is shaped by state control, wealth disparities between regions and social classes, and a care politics deeming certain groups as failing to meet the human capital requirements of the new economy. While providing some buffer against destitution, existing forms of social protection do little to alleviate the social exclusion and inequality resulting from post-reform dispossession.
Since socialist Vietnam embraced a market economy in the mid-1980s, high population mobility has engendered shifting forms of insecurity in rural livelihoods and family lives. This article discusses how migrant households in a Red River Delta rural district draw on institutions of care beyond family and kinship to deal with such insecurity. These institutions simultaneously respond to local people’s changing needs and aspirations, and attempt to exert social and moral control. I show the increasing conditionality and commodification in the entitlements they provide and the differential ability of migrant households in accessing them. These rationalities are constitutive of the changing ways in which the institutions exert moral authority.
This paper examines the mode of governmentality applicable as an analytical framework in socialist states committed to market socialism. The successes of socialist states like China and Vietnam over the past few decades since their market-based reforms are attributable to this diversifying mode of governmentality and have challenged the binary dichotomy between socialism and neoliberalism. The party-states in China and Vietnam have begun to search for a post-socialist mode of governmentality, which resonates with the departure from neoliberalism towards post-neoliberalism in various capitalist countries. In Vietnam, there are signs of reconfiguration and restructuring of the party-states in such a highly complicated and fluid context to adapt themselves to a more sustainable governmentality. This results in the amorphous and ambivalent situation of a double movement of accommodating and resisting neoliberalism. That, in turn, reveals significant implications for a transformative potential for political change.
The transition from state socialism to market socialism in Vietnam and China has been characterized by unprecedented rural-urban migration. We argue that this migration is integral rather than incidental to the gendered reproduction of state and society. A review of the emerging literature on trans-local householding explores the process whereby the reflexive engagement of the state and the household remakes rural-urban differentiation in ways that are deeply gendered and classed. As such, state regulation and control of migrants are part of a process of reconfiguring state-society relations in which the production of space and the symbolic valuation of ruralness and urbanness have become a central trope.
This essay examines the evolution of welfare regimes in contemporary China and Viet Nam. Specifically, it examines how the degeneration of state-socialist regimes and the evolution of new political economies in their wake have shaped institutional arrangements governing the provision and payment for education and health services and their stratification effects. A foundational assumption of welfare regimes analysis is that welfare institutions evolve interdependently with prevailing political and economic institutions. That is, historically emergent combinations of political and economic institutions that define a given political economy – and express the precise relation between state and economy – profoundly affect welfare and stratification. Analysing welfare regimes in China and Viet Nam raises interesting questions about the nature and dynamics of their political economies and more general questions about how welfare regimes evolve in the transition from one form of political economy to another. This essay argues that welfare regimes and stratification in contemporary China and Viet Nam may not be understood without appreciating their properties under state-socialism and how specific paths of extrication affected their degeneration and subsequent development under a new form of political economy.
This book explores three major changes in the circumstances of the migrant working class in south China over the past three decades, from historical and comparative perspectives. It examines the rise of a male migrant working population in the export industries, a shift in material and social lives of migrant workers, and the emergence of a new non-coercive factory regime in the industries. By conducting on-site fieldwork regarding Hong Kong-invested garment factories in south China, Hong Kong and Vietnam, alongside factory-gate surveys in China and Vietnam, this book examines how and why the circumstances of workers in these localities are dissimilar even when under the same type of factory ownership. In analyzing workers’ lives within and outside factories, and the expansion of global capitalism in East and Southeast Asia, the book contributes to research on production politics and everyday life practice, and an understanding of how global and local forces interact.
This book develops an understanding of workplace justice and labour rights in Vietnam from factory workers’ voices and their resistance against abuse and exploitation. Through interviews with workers and a close analysis of their letters and petitions to the unions and state authorities, Nguyen illuminates how workers’ resistance is enabled and stifled by the legal and political systems that are supposed to protect their rights and benefits. Their calls for justice reflect socialist ideology and widely held norms within society, as well as ideals and values embedded in labour law. The book demonstrates how state law brings about social change through shaping workers’ expectations and increasing consciousness of rights and justice.
This book will be of interest to scholars of law, politics and society, and scholars, students and practitioners interested in labour rights in developing countries.
The Vietnamese term for socialization, xã hội hóa, is grounded in its history of socialist construction, originally referring to the collectivization of property and resources. Since the country shifted to a market economy, yet remaining under the leadership of the Communist Party, the term has come to imply the individualization of responsibilities and the privatization of public goods. As a policy, however, it continues to evoke the idioms of ‘the whole society’ or ‘all the people’ as the basis of wellbeing and development. This paper examines the practices of socialization as part of broader shifts in welfare provision and local dynamics of exemplarity. I show that socialization concerns not only the mobilization of resources, but also the production of a moral subject that is self-optimized and yet sensitized to helping others, self-governed and yet governable by the party state. In a socialist country that is rapidly marketising, this moral subject plays into governing rationalities that blends new-prudentialist logics with socialist genealogies, privatization with a notion of society within which individual actions can be made morally meaningful. While the tension and contestation induced by people’s greater burdens are immanent, the continued reference to collective idioms appeals to people’s moral sensibilities, and thus makes socialization meaningful to some extent, even as they resent the turn away from broad-based structures of wellbeing.
1887) Capital volume
- K Marx
Vietnam Places Market Logic Above Workers’ Rights
- A N Tran