From Rights to Interests: The Challenge of Industrial Relations in Vietnam

Since the mid-1990s Vietnam has achieved rapid economic growth based on the attraction of foreign investment within an unchanged political environment. Changing employment relations have presented a major challenge to the rights-based institutional forms of regulation of industrial relations established in the early stages of reform, which have proved slow to adapt to the new circumstances in which disputes are interest-based. The persistence of strikes has led the authorities to pay increasing attention to industrial relations issues, but their approach remains confined within the legalistic framework of the state-socialist era. Trade unions show little inclination or ability to stand up to employers on behalf of their members, while Vietnamese workers show a preference for direct action over representation through bureaucratic industrial relations structures.