Workplace Justice

This chapter sets the background for the study of labour law and labour resistance in Vietnam as a transitional economy. It outlines important changes in labour relations and discusses structural factors underpinning the prevalence of labour resistance following industrial transition in Vietnam. Drawing from political economy and rightful resistance literature, the chapter examines different views concerning the role of legal institutions in advancing labour rights and factory workers’ actions to protect those rights. Yet there has been little in-depth analysis in existing literature as to how workers perceive their rights in relation to the labour law, and whether and how values embedded in law underpin their claims and ideals of justice. The chapter moves on to discuss the conceptual framework used in this book, adopted from socio-legal studies, which allows for a nuanced understanding of the intersection between law and other social norms and institutions in shaping labour resistance in Vietnam.

This chapter provides background information about the labour law regime, which is necessary for an understanding of the relationship between law and labour resistance in Vietnam. It outlines the development and significance of the Vietnamese Labour Code in the regulation of industrial relations in Vietnam. Second, it discusses key aspects of the Labour Code that concern key workers’ rights and benefits, workplace relationships, and the types and resolution of labour disputes. The next section addresses the state’s approach towards law and labour regulation over the past few decades, taking the example of strike settlement and strike prevention in the field site of Đông Nai Province, and outlines the development of the union’s legal aid activities and their objectives in relation to workers’ rights protection.

This chapter investigates the grievances and demands of workers interviewed in 2014 and 2015 who had been involved in strikes in six selected companies in Đông Nai Province, and includes an in-depth discussion of one company case study. In justifying their grievances concerning wages and working conditions, most workers provide an understanding of workplace relationships drawn from moral norms of subsistence and reciprocity, and call upon management and the state to uphold their moral obligations. The chapter argues that interviewed workers exhibit consciousness of their basic social rights, which are broader than but somehow overlap with legal rights granted in the Labour Code. The relationship between these rights in turn demonstrates the fluidity between values derived from law and other sets of norms in shaping workers’ views and expressions of justice.

This chapter examines how labour law shapes another form of labour resistance in Vietnam: workers’ lodgement of letters to local union offices, including a letter published in full in the national labour newspaper. It finds that, in workers’ experience on the shop floor, legal provisions supposed to protect their interests have been replaced with arbitrary rules that have perpetuated exploitation and silenced their voices. However, most letter writers do not judge managerial conduct nor frame workers’ demands explicitly in terms of labour law, but through the lens of conscience and morality. Workers who adopt language from the labour law attempt to emphasise their expressions of immoral treatment rather than make a legal case. The styles of those letters also vary as writers go from depicting workers’ hardship and destitution in an emotional manner to bargaining and negotiating for a fair reward. These modes of narrative are underpinned and accompanied by different values concerning workers’ relationship with the state and management: the moral economy value that workers’ subsistence shall be guaranteed and reciprocal obligations shall be upheld, and the ideal of social equality. As the labour law contains provisions and principles that reflect those moral values, workers’ moral understandings of justice indeed resonate with how labour relations should operate according to law, rather than in place of it.

This chapter discusses legal aid activities in Đông Nai Province in which workers are both the main beneficiaries and active participants in legal mobilisation. The ‘core workers,’ recruited and trained under this project, have employed their legal knowledge to offer legal assistance to ordinary factory workers in their residential areas, at the same time engaging with law enforcement institutions to demand justice for themselves and their fellow workers. The chapter highlights the catchphrase of ‘defending their rights and interests’ as a thread that runs through the union’s legal aid objective and examines the potential of legal aid in shaping workers’ views of labour relations and workplace problems, providing the social space for grievance sharing, and enabling disadvantaged workers to break their silence against unjust practices.

This chapter explores three case studies of core workers who play certain role in contesting practices at their own companies and the challenges of collective legal mobilisation. It examines whether their hope and confidence in the law changed when they themselves resort to law to confront mistreatment and injustice at work. In putting their legal knowledge and awareness into practice, these core workers have called upon the state and management to uphold their legal obligations to workers’ plight. Yet an evocation of law does not necessarily alter, challenge, or negate existing social values and norms, such as those that concern mutual respect, reciprocal obligations, and the socialist ideals of equality. Core workers’ language of resistance does not stop at a call for a proper implementation of law, but also brings out the moral values imbued in management’s legal obligations and extends the legal rights claim to assert a broader call for social justice. The chapter also evaluates the potential of legal aid in enabling workers’ collective mobilisation and examines changes in core workers’ legal consciousness as they engage with the formal system of dispute resolution.

The conclusion to the book summarises its main argument, that is, the relationship between law and morality is fluid, and values derived from law and moral norms can complement and overlap with each other in workers’ claim-making. It situates the findings on Vietnamese workers within broader literature on labour resistance in post-socialist regimes and socio-legal scholarship on legal consciousness and social change. The findings of this book pave way for an analytical reframing of law in post-socialist societies. Despite many limitations in its enforcement, state law brings about social change through informing and shaping people’s expectations. This subtle effect of law does not always lead to overt actions or articulations to contest problematic practices, but is an important indication of increasing consciousness of fairness, justice, and rights.