Since the launch of the economic reform (Doi Moi) policy in the early 1990s, the union system of Vietnam has seen little change: the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL) retains its monopoly, its political affiliation to and reliance on the Communist Party, while at the workplace, the VGCL-affiliated enterprise unions are too dependent on the management to represent workers' rights and interests. 'Collective bargaining by riots' has become the only way for rank-and-file workers to improve their working conditions. This article draws on more than a decade of research to show that informal organization of workers in some companies has grown to such an extent that the de facto leaders initiate bargaining with the employers and, when negotiations fail, they organize strikes. These strikes are usually settled in favour of the workers, causing a change in wage levels and leading to spontaneous 'copycat' strikes in neighbouring companies. This informal coordination of strikes across workplaces not only aims at achieving economic goals such as wage rises but has recently been used to express workers' discontent with government policy. The nature of the strike waves has shifted gradually from economic to political; together with external pressure, this has pushed the top leadership of Vietnam to initiate serious trade union reform. Do Quynh Chi (doquynhchi@quanhelaodong.com) is the chief researcher and Director of the Research Center for Employment Relations, an independent research institute based in Hanoi, Vietnam, specializing in labour issues.
Despite its one‐party regime, recent changes in industrial relations policy in Vietnam have been increasingly influenced by interactions between grassroots initiatives and the policy‐making institutions. By examining how strike‐hit enterprises adopted ‘fence‐breaking’ initiatives to improve employee participation and how these grassroots changes influenced the policy debates in Hanoi, the paper argues that the driving force of the industrial relations reform in Vietnam has come from the continuous negotiations and interactions between the rules, the rule‐makers and the rule‐takers at the grassroots level.
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