Labor in Transition

Labor in Transition

CONTEXT

One of the fundamental goals of communist societies was the exaltation of the culture and needs of the proletarian working class. While Karl Marx had hoped that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would spell the end of the need for central government authority, in fact the transition to communism was generally associated with a marked strengthening of central state authority as governments sought to stamp out private association and put the mark of the state on every dimension of social interaction. The extension of state authority certainly included the workplace.

Vladimir Lenin had sought to use labor unions as both instruments of control and feedback, creating a single legitimate union under state control. Using the image of a “transmission belt,” his idea was that a state-sanctioned union would serve to transmit government decrees down to the workers, and to return feedback from workers to governmental decision-making bodies. Certainly, the union structures which emerged in the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam were effective at transmitting governmental decrees and disseminating them among workers, but this is largely due to the fact that local union committees came to have sweeping power over the everyday lives of common people. Unions came to have strong influence over work assignments, and associated access to food, housing, and educational opportunities. While they were probably capable of transmitting information in the other direction, there is ample evidence that at least in the Soviet case this information tended to veer toward creating a positive impression among leaders in the next level of the bureaucracy rather than actually helping the state to identify and resolve worker problems. Even in cases where actual worker concerns were transmitted back up to leadership, the extent to which that information factored into decision-making remains unclear.

As suggested above, Vietnam also adopted a single, state run labor union, the Vietnam General Confederation of Labor (VGCL) which was modeled on the union Lenin had created for the Soviet Union. As in other places, the obvious conflict of interest created by mandating a government department to simultaneously represent both sides of labor disputes limited its effectiveness, but Vietnamese society seems to have favored consensus more highly than the Soviets or Chinese, allowing for local leeway and mitigating the worst excesses of the system.

As the Vietnamese economy has sought to transition toward a full and open market economy, the change for the average Vietnamese worker has been dramatic, and is far from entirely completed. For many, the dissolution of the state welfare system has left them exposed in a way unknown in Vietnam for a generation. Further, the money to be made in urban areas has lead to a rush of people out of the countryside and into cities, although as will be explored below, it seems likely that the newly-possible movement of labor forces is probably much more complex than a simple movement of people away from farms. Further, labor representation has not kept pace with the needs of workers increasingly exposed to the excesses of foreign investors mainly interested in producing goods at the lowest possible costs. As with so many rapidly industrializing economies around the world, the burden of unequal labor relations tends to fall disproportionately on those with the least ability to fight against an exploitative system.

TEXT

Eva Hansson, Authoritarian Governance and Labour: The VGCL and the Party-State in Economic Renovation. in Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, Russell H.K. Heng, David W.H. Koh, Getting Organized in Vietnam: Moving in and Around the Socialist State. (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2003).

Hansson’s project is an examination of the relationship between Vietnam’s official state workers union, the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL) and the evolving landscape for society as Vietnam transitions into an increasingly open market economy.

Hansson suggests that traditionally, the VGCL was an important institution in the working life of most Vietnamese. Originally conceived as a model Leninist institution, the VGCL was intended to serve as a “transmission belt” between state propaganda and production initiatives and the workers meant to implement them, effectively transmitting in both directions. However effectively it ever managed to do this, the VGCL was given a wide range of other responsibilities that gave it great influence in the lives of workers. The union administered housing, work assignments, pensions, and large areas of the social support network the government provided for the population.

Hansson argues that the evolution toward a market economy has left the VGCL struggling to adapt to the transformed cultural landscape. Now stripped of many of its administrative responsibilities, the VGCL continues to view itself as essentially an arm of the government, and prides itself on resolving any tensions between workers and the increasingly diverse ownership of factories in a “consensual” manner that minimizes (in practice, seems to totally avoid) direct confrontation between the two groups.

Hansson argues that in practice, this approach has left the VGCL increasingly irrelevant to the majority of the Vietnamese workforce, and as a result they are compelled to organize their own groups to address their needs, possibly heralding the emergence of a more active civil society. Hansson argues that strikes are becoming increasingly common, but they are the product of local worker organizations, comprised of people who are only vaguely aware of the existence of the VGCL, and certainly do not see it as an institution responsive to their needs. Indeed, Hansson suggests that even when the VGCL involves itself in worker action, Vietnamese society lacks the institutional ability to enforce legal decisions in the face of management resistance.

Hansson’s argument for the future, specifically that increasingly frequent locally organized strikes could be pointing the way toward a more dynamic civil society is interesting, but largely unsupported by any evidence in her article. It is true that the failure of the VGCL to represent worker interests in any meaningful way has created a space which could be filled by a non-state organization capable of doing so, isolated worker strikes do not give much appearance of being, or becoming, such an organization. Without some indication that workers are thinking beyond the immediate needs of a particular factory, the real scope of this work remains isolated to these discrete events.

SUBTEXTS

Kim Korinek, Maternal Employment During Northern Vietnam’s Era of Market Reform. Social Forces Vol. 83 No. 2 (December, 2004) 791-822.

In this article, Korinek argues that women in Southeast Asia are required to work at a high level of intensity, one which has become greater since the 1990’s and which peaks during the years when children are in their teenage years. She suggests that women come to see work as integral to the parental and domestic duties and tends to be necessary to supplement male income, which is generally insufficient to meet household needs. These trends have been reinforced by the egalitarianism of communist ideology, which stresses gender equality, but that processes largely attributable to globalization have made earning the necessary wages more difficult. Increases in labor expectations outside the home have not tended to be offset by decreased expectations on the domestic front, and the wartime expedient of pressing women into the workforce in large numbers has tended to carry forward into the peacetime economy.

Burdens placed on women have increased as market reforms have stripped away childcare subsidies and much of the funding for rural schools, two obvious areas of supplemental income for women.

However, the heart of the article is a qualitative analysis of the intensity of the work women do, drawing on a longitudinal study of a number of women to calculate the burdens of work expected from them. The study concludes that work intensity for women in almost every facet of society is “high.” The nature of the study, however, seems problematic, and the frequent use of multipliers to adjust the data seems to complicate interpretation unnecessarily.

On the whole, Korinek’s study seems determined to quantify something which would be better approached qualitatively. It remains unclear how to best evaluate the accuracy of the numbers used, while the very idea that one can meaningfully evaluate work intensity across occupation groups seems problematic. Still, her fundamental point, that women in China and Vietnam are tasked with a disproportionate workload which has not been reduced by the collapse of command economies, is certainly a factor which has to be considered in any picture of the social consequences of the transition to market economies.

Tuong Vu, Workers and the Socialist state: North Vietnam’s state-Labor relations, 1945-1970. Communist and Post-Communist Studies 38 (2005) 329-356.

Vu undertakes an interesting comparative study of the labor regimes in the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam, with particular focus on the latter as it has seen relatively little prior scholarship. In Vu’s analysis, the Soviet Union pursued a labor regime which was primarily focused not on the creation of a large, homogenous working class but on enlarging the proletarian model inherited from the Tsarist regime while maintaining its loyalty. The Chinese apparently focused on mass mobilization more than output, struggling to bring large numbers of people into the workforce whether they were really needed or not. Vietnam was a different matter. According to Vu, Vietnam began in 1945 by adopting a model based on mobilization, but was already backing away from this by 1950, to be replaced by an emphasis on discipline and control. Vu argues that on the whole, Vietnam was less successful at maintaining control over its workforce. In part, this was due to the fact that the social status system was not powerful enough to overcome the willingness to collude across ranks to misappropriate funds, and because Vietnamese workers remained unusually independent. He suggests that paradoxically, the siphoned resources worked to alleviate some of the privations of a command economy, but also led to increasing wastefulness and inefficiency. Ultimately, North Vietnam was no more successful than any other communist state in producing the model socialist economy or worker.

Anita Chan and Irene Norlund, Vietnamese and Chinese Labour Regimes: On the Road to Divergence. The China Journal, No. 40, Special Issue: Transforming Asian Socialism: China and Vietnam Compared, (July, 1998), 173-197.

Chan and Norlund argue that while the Vietnamese and Chinese labor regimes appear fundamentally similar, they are increasingly divergent with regard to their approach to labor unions. In both states, where personal interests were subordinated to the interests of the state, the unions served primarily to transmit state directives down to work units rather than effectively transmitting information in the other direction. In China, workers continue to be represented by the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), an organization which did attempt to wrest enough independence to represent some worker grievances back to the government and was disbanded for its trouble and reconstituted in 1980 as an instrument of Beijing’s authority.

By contrast, Vietnam’s history of labor representation is more complex. In part, this is due to the fact that it originated in two different state systems. Although one might expect that the North would have attempted to control its labor units much as China or the Soviet Union did, but in fact the necessity of operating a wartime economy for decades meant that it was never really able to impose centralized authority to the degree it might have hoped to. In the South, the government had no control over the unions at all, and had a tradition of being able to stand up to unfair working practices, and the government.

In both China and Vietnam, entry into the global economy has required a fundamental reappraisal of workplace practices as the industrial sectors of both economies are forced to confront modern technologies and grapple with efficiency before full employment. China has been erratically dismantling the Iron Rice Bowl since the 1980’s, a process which played a significant role in prompting the 1989 urban protests which included the best known in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. However, Chinese industry suffers from massive overproduction, and as state-run enterprises have become increasingly less profitable, China has continued to reduce the state workforce and allowed one unprofitable factory after another to slide into bankruptcy, always having to balance these measures against the danger of civil unrest which inevitably accompany them.

Vietnam started this process later than China, but pursued the agenda more aggressively and currently suffers from a greater unemployment problem than the Chinese. However, Chan and Norlund argue that the ultimate effect of this transition on the Vietnamese economy is less notable than that of China, due to the fact that the state employed a relatively smaller percentage of the Vietnamese workforce. However, other factors have contributed to labor unrest. The demobilization of 400,000 soldiers following the end of hostilities with Cambodia could not be readily absorbed by the civilian labor market, but they argue that overall unemployment was down to approximately 7% by 1996.

In both economies, workers in labor intensive industry now mostly work for piece rates, and workforces are increasingly drawn from migrant workers who displace the traditional employees, further undermining social stability. Both economies have seem a concomitant increase in labor unrest, but while in China these have frequently become violent, in Vietnam they are generally resolved with negotiation. Still, the arrival of foreign capital and the foreign directors which accompany it has tended to introduce exploitative labor practices which workers struggle to combat through any traditional channels. Currently, while the party maintains an iron grip over the ACFTU, Vietnam has passed a series of increasingly ambiguous laws which suggest that workers might expect greater state support in future confrontations.

Adam Fforde and Stefan de Vylder, From Plan to Market: The Economic Transition in Vietnam. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).

Fforde and de Vylder are attempting to understand the Vietnamese transition from a planned to a market economy. They point out that the Vietnamese economy had already undergone significant transition by 1989, but seek to argue that the accelerated reforms that followed that watershed year should be understood as fundamentally “bottom up” rather than the product of a deliberate state plan, and that if policy was fundamentally reactive it is perhaps a misnomer to describe the process as reform. They suggest that the Vietnamese economy has since 1975 had a significant gap between the official ideology which was intended to guide it and the reality on the ground.

Stephanie Fahey, Changing Labour Relations. in Dilemmas of Development: Vietnam Update 1994, Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet ed. (Canberra: Department of Political and Social Change Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies of the Australian National University, 1995) 45-67.

Fahey argues that Vietnamese workers are encountering significant challenges as their country transitions toward a market economy. Faced with problems including the disintegrating web of social support structures, the inefficacy of labor relation organizations, and the collapse of the state owned enterprises (SOE’s) which had previously dominated the industrial economy, Vietnam has responded by attempting to create a legal framework regulating the emerging economy.

Fahey suggests that this project to impose a framework of laws has been deeply problematic, with implementation and enforcement varying widely by region. This material is not breaking much in the way of new ground, and one suspects that Vietnam’s emerging legal regulatory system suffers from more serious problems than uneven regional enforcement. Still, the focus on constructing a legal framework to deal with the problems of market reforms does move the focus away from an essentially socialist model with greater profit potential, and covers a great deal of ground in a very few pages.

Adam Fforde, The Vietnamese Economy in 1992: Development and Prospects. in Vietnam and the Rule of Law, Carlyle A. Thayer and David G. Marr, eds. (Canberra: Department of Political and Social Change Research School of Pacific Studies of the Australian National University, 1993), 23-38.

Fforde suggests that by 1993, a scant four years after the official Vietnamese switch toward market reforms, the national economy continued to struggle but that its problems were no longer systematic, and that a thriving unofficial economy had flowered almost overnight, relying on privately held capital and smuggling.

Fforde suggests that after four years, the Vietnamese national economy remained problematically stretched between its socialist past and its capitalist future. While many state owned enterprises (SOE’s) had been ruthlessly sold off, banks were still required to extend loans to those that remained at interest rates lower than those being offered to depositors, effectively hamstringing public credit markets. Further, much of the industrial sector remained tooled to produce goods without markets, requiring significant external investment if they were to be made competitive in the world market.

However, this bleak picture is far from complete. If the official economy remained mired in transition, the unofficial (formerly black market?) economy apparently had transitioned much more rapidly and effectively. Large pools of privately held capital were apparently available for private loans, and fuelled a flourishing illegal trade that exploited Vietnam’s traditional position along major trade routes.

Carlyle A. Thayer, Vietnam. in Regional Outlook Forum 2005: Political Outlook for Malaysia, Myanmar, and Vietnam, Trends in Southeast Asia Series: 2 (2005) 21-31.

By contrast, Thayer argues that by 2004, the Vietnamese economy seems to have overcome the difficulties sketched by Fforde above and to have successfully integrated into the international economy. By 2004 Vietnam was enjoying record high levels of foreign investment, over 20 billion USD in export trade, and plunging rates of domestic poverty despite the Asian market crash and outbreaks of avian flu.

Further, Thayer suggests that the one-party state which has endured since the days of communism has by all appearances weathered the transition to a market economy, at least to the extent that there is no widespread opposition to its rule and no obvious alternative on the visible horizon. Thayer is arguing that despite the many challenges faced by the Vietnamese government in the course of the transition, the workforce seems to be benefiting (if unevenly) from the influx of funds, and to be reconciled to the political status quo.