Actively cautious

The industrial park

For every Xuan villager, the industrial park is an unprecedented feature in the village’s history. Before its establishment, there had been no such industrial facility within a five-mile radius of the village. ⁸ A rectangular enclave surrounded by high brick walls, the industrial park has a spacious tarmac-surfaced lane in the outermost for trucks transporting goods to and fro.

What the district government responsible for the park’s construction had planned was a complex containing five Vietnamese and two FDI factories. However, only the two FDI factories were in operation during my fieldwork. One is a South Korean garment enterprise producing high-fashion clothing, and the other is a Hong Kong manufacturer of LED light bulbs. They account for 70 per cent of the park’s area and expected waged employment opportunities.

Both are typical of large manufacturing plants from Asian Tiger economies that have pervaded industrial complexes in today’s rural Vietnam. Both feature large workshops with flat corrugated iron roofs, all of which are bigger than any structure ever seen in Xuan. In contemporary Vietnam, such industrial facilities are immediately recognized as the latest-generation FDI factories of assembly plants and outsourcing enterprises, producing consumer products for export and capable of employing thousands of workers each. They are generally considered much more advanced than state-owned factories in Vietnamese cities that villagers knew before Renovation: Soviet-style metal-bashing heavy manufacturing plants with high smokestacks, now widely considered obsolete and unproductive.

As Wang (2005) points out, because the Vietnamese government considers attracting and keeping those FDI factories in the country a top priority to modernize the nation, it has provided those foreign companies with substantial preferential treatment. Not only do they offer substantial tax reduction or even exemption to FDI enterprises that put their factories in rural industrial complexes, but Vietnamese authorities even leave workplace trade unions largely in the control of foreign factory owners (Bình, 2008; Phong, 2007). Xuan village workers told me that although the chairs of the trade unions in both factories are Vietnamese, both are actually subordinates of the factory owners. They never do anything to protect the workers’ rights to wage increases or job security, and even help the owners suppress workers’ complaints.

Neither do local village officials play any part in protecting village workers’ rights. Unlike their counterparts in China (Paik, 2014), village officials in Vietnam and Xuan have little say in how the factories should be run. As Vietnamese villages do not have ownership rights over land as villages in China do (Ho and Lin, 2004), the village officials like Chairman Hung lack the institutionalized power of land-owners that their Chinese counterparts possess to negotiate with foreign employers to protect village workers’ labour rights.

The challenges in the factories

While the village officials praise industrial wage work as a new kind of employment that every villager will want for themselves, what Xuan workers have actually experienced is very similar to the experiences of workers in FDI factories elsewhere in Vietnam (Angie, 2012) and the rest of Asia (Chan, 2001; Ong, 1987). For most Xuan workers, the industrial park is a grim, low-skill, dead-end employment in a degrading workplace, where they are subject to the vagaries of foreign investors and their subordinates, with little support from local village authorities.

While the officials state that factory work is an opportunity for everyone, only villagers from the few households that had their holdings appropriated were automatically offered a job in the factories as part of the agreement they had made with the factory owners in exchange for the loss of their holdings, like the case of Mr Vinh. For most other villagers, getting a factory job is much more challenging. Since the industrial park commenced operation, the factories have received an influx of applications far exceeding their labour-absorbing capacity, from not only Xuan locals, but also villagers in neighbouring areas and migrant workers from other provinces. Because of the labour oversupply, most villagers are subject to a highly competitive application process, in which the factories give little preferential treatment to applications from Xuan locals. Mrs Trang told me that her application would have been unsuccessful had it not been sponsored by a cousin of her husband, who is a shift manager in the garment factory. Out of 20 villagers applying with her, only Trang and another were accepted. The other successful applicant told Trang she had discreetly offered sweeteners to recruitment officers to get the job.

Those who have been recruited face new problems. First is the unwelcome working style and rhythms of factory employment. As industrial work demands full-time compliance to strict working timetables, all workers complain that they no longer have the comfort of flexible working time they had when practicing self-employed livelihood strategies like paddy farming, by-employments and retailing. As Mrs Trang explained:

Before becoming workers, we worked when we wanted to work, rested when we wanted to rest. If we got sick, we could easily take a day-off from paddy farming or chicken rearing. But since I started working in the factory, I cannot be late to work for a minute. Sometimes my legs were so in pain at work that I wanted to stand up and walk around for five minutes, but the manager did not allow that because I worked in a production line and I would slow others down if I took a break.

Another key concern of the village’s factory workers is working conditions. Upon becoming workers, they were told by the district and village officials they would have free lunch, a clean working space and ample opportunities for technical training and job promotion. What they have actually experienced, however, is vastly different.

Although the factories provide workers with free lunch, the quality of the food is far below what villagers expect. I regularly joined Mr Vinh and other village workers for breakfast at a noodle-soup stall at the village marketplace. Everyone always ordered a portion twice my size. As Vinh explained, the food provided by the factories at lunch had been terrible, in his words, ‘không nuốt nổi’, literally ‘can’t be swallowed’. Therefore, they had to have a large breakfast to have enough energy for the whole exhausting workday. Some village workers in the light-bulb factory I met at a wedding party showed me a slice of meat we had that day, comparing it with the one in their lunch set at work, which he secretly photographed with his phone: “The meat slice in the company has become thinner day by day, now as thin as a paper. The ones we have at home are ten times thicker”, the worker commented bitterly.

Most workers speak angrily about recently effective rules issued by the employers, which had turned the factories into what they jokingly called ‘concentration camps’ (trại tập trung), comparing their situation with the inmates of Nazi prisons they had seen in movies. “We aren’t allowed to talk to each other, or be late for work for five minutes. We even have to ask our bosses for permission to go to the restroom, like children asking parents, and only twice a shift”, said Mrs Trang. That day her employer severely scolded her and accused her of slacking-off when she asked the former to use the restroom for the third time in the shift.

Another concern voiced by villagers is the gloomy prospect of further training, promotion and wage increase. Most workers recall that upon starting their work, they were excited when the employers announced the plan to select some new recruits to send for advanced skill training financed by the factories to handle ‘high-level jobs’ (công việc bậc cao), like cutting large cloth sheets into smaller sizes for sewing workers to handle in the garment factory, and assembling complex bulbs in the light-bulb factory. Those handling high-level jobs earn at least four million VND per month (£130), twice the wage of an average worker. ⁹

During my fieldwork, however, only five out of 350 village workers had obtained such high-level jobs. As for the majority, although none of them has any prior training in factory work, the factories only provided them with a short one-week training course to handle the particular task they would be assigned to in the production line. Without further training, the majority have been stuck in what they have been doing since the beginning: ‘basic-level jobs’ (công việc cơ bản). The factory managers use this term to describe entry-level positions available to everyone. A basic-level worker is paid the standard monthly wage of two million VND (£65) to handle a simple task in the production line, like thread reeling, stitching, sewing in the garment company or assembling cheap light-bulbs in the light-bulb factory.

Many workers showed me their work uniforms, which the factories had given to basic-level workers and which were distinguishable from the more expensive high-level worker outfit. Their uniforms all had a much worn, washed-out collar because they had worn the same uniform since the day they started factory work. “They [the employers] don’t really want to train us. They just want us to remain untrained workers forever, so they can pay us as little as possible, and replace us anytime they want”, a worker said angrily. His anger reflects a view shared by all factory workers I know: the outsourcing enterprises they work for only want a docile, untrained workforce. The last thing they want are what the Vietnamese state expects: confident, well-trained assertive young moderns with problematic ideas about being worth more than they are paid.

From basic subsistence to a better life

Amongst Xuan households with factory workers, those headed by young couples like Mrs Trang’s household are generally considered the most financially constrained and thus much poorer than those with a wider portfolio of remunerative income-earning strategies like Mr Vinh’s household.

However, when recalling the many challenges they had encountered since Trang became a factory worker, Trang and her husband did not want me to think they were forced to accept the undesirable terms of factory work out of desperation. During a conversation at Trang’s house, we came across a TV news report of the kind widely aired on Vietnamese television today. The news was about the terrible working conditions of migrant workers in a well-known southern industrial city. Having sold their arable land to settle debts and without alternatives to live off, those workers had to leave their children in the custody of grandparents and migrate to cities, accepting terrible working conditions in factories to pay for accommodation in the city and tiny remittances to send home.

“Rural or urban, the working conditions of workers today are always hard”, I said, implying that what those migrant workers had endured shared remarkable similarities with the hardships Trang had encountered when pursuing factory work. Trang, however, immediately tried to differentiate herself from the urban migrant workers:

The challenges might be similar, but our aims are very different. The workers on TV no longer have land to farm or any other jobs, therefore they certainly have to take up factory work at all costs to feed themselves and their families. But Xuan workers are different. Before we applied for factory work, we still had a house to live in, some holdings to plant our rice, and had never worried about what to eat and where to sleep.

For most budget-tight households like Trang’s, undertaking factory work was a decision actively made, in pursuit of a substantial income addition that could elevate their living standards from basic subsistence to a good life. As the couple recalled, in their early years after marriage, the incomes from her husband’s carpentry work and paddy farming were sufficient for their everyday living and even modest savings. However, soon before the industrial park commenced operation, they had their second child, and their budget became much tighter. Cultivating paddy could only give them enough food for everyday consumption. Although they did not worry about meeting basic essentials thanks to the husband’s earning from carpentry, they spent most of the earning on everyday expenses, thus managing little savings. “Since the child was born, we could only make enough to put in our mouths”, said Trang. She showed me that the TV set we were watching and an old bike in the living room were their only valuable assets back then. However, both were given to them by Trang’s parents. With the incomes from carpentry and paddy farming, they could only afford basic essentials and a safety net for modest security, with minimal chance of savings for better comforts. “My parents and parents-in-law both told us we must try to find new income sources, not only to pay for food and clothing, but also more amenities for our children”, Trang recalled.

In this context, factory work offered them exactly what they badly needed: a substantial income supplement to improve their family’s life. Six months after Trang started factory employment, although paddy farming still contributed little to their budget apart from food sufficiency, the household’s financial status had become completely different. One day I met the couple at a cash machine near the garment factory’s gate, where workers withdraw their monthly wage. Since Trang started factory work, although the work was laborious and she only had a lowest-paid basic-level job, she had earned a monthly wage equal to her husband’s carpentry payment, and half a year of gain from cultivating paddy. That day was the first time the couple withdrew money from the machine to buy a refrigerator. As Trang happily told me, using the term “tiện nghi” (amenities), meaning desirable comforts beyond basic necessities:

When we only had paddy farming to supplement my husband’s carpentry work, we could only think of having enough to eat and cloth ourselves. But now we also have income from factory work, so we can think about more amenities.

The insecurities of the industrial workplace

While Xuan villagers share with the village officials the idea that factory employment can bring important benefits to their families, they strongly disagree with the officials’ claim that industrial employment can be their lifetime career and the eternal warranty of their family’s well-being. For all village workers, the biggest concern is that they can be fired at any time. This means losing not only a substantial income, but also the prospect of getting what they want most when applying for factory work: retirement pension to care for their old age (Angie, 2012; Phong, 2007). In Vietnam, a person will be entitled to a pension if s/he has been employed in wage employment for at least 20 years by the time of retirement. After two years of the park’s operation, however, no Xuan village worker believes that they can last that long. All say that what the village officials represent as a symbol of employment security has become an icon of utmost insecurity for them.

Compared to the park’s first year in operation, the rate of workers fired by the factories, including both village workers and migrant workers, had increased five times in the second year. Surprisingly, most workers were fired not because they were unable to handle heavy workloads or complex tasks. A worker was fired from the light-bulb company as the manager-in-charge said he turned his head sideways three times in a shift, hence accusing him of slacking-off.

Xuan village workers widely believe that there is a causal relationship between the increasing number of villagers dismissed and the growing influx of migrant workers. The migrant workers’ presence has been welcomed by Xuan shopkeepers, rental housing providers and noodle-soup sellers, as the migrants represent a big demand for their services. Village workers, by contrast, rarely talk to the migrant workers, and when amongst themselves, often criticize the migrants for speaking loudly and casually dumping garbage.

But I soon recognize the main cause of this hostility: the village workers think that the migrant workers’ presence has created an oversupply of labour for the factories. Therefore, factory employers can use the dismissal no longer as a form of casualization to eliminate those found unqualified for the jobs, but as an exploitative device to minimize labour costs by utilizing a system that all workers disdain: the ‘probationary period’ (thời gian thử việc).

The factory employers use this term to refer to the time taken to evaluate whether new recruits are really capable of the job, before offering them an official contract. A worker will not receive wages for the first three months, until they complete the probationary period. Only then can they be offered an official labour contract, usually for one year, and the whole three-month wage is then paid in one installment. However, if they quit or are dismissed for not meeting performance requirements before that deadline, they receive nothing. For an average village household, the perceived total loss would be equal to the household’s total income in three months.

Village workers on probation widely believe that the factory managers now deliberately find ways to fire them before the end of the probationary period to appropriate their labour for free. Villagers defend this conclusion by referencing an unusual piece of evidence: recruitment posters placed at the factories’ entrances.

During my fieldwork I initially saw nothing unusual in such posters. Like recruitment posters in industrial parks across Vietnam, they advertise short, simple vacancy notices. The one at the garment factory reads, “300 workers needed. No prior training required”. What makes these posters abnormal, the village workers say, is that all the positions in the factories have already been filled. Therefore the only reason the factories advertise the need for hundreds of new recruits is because they plan to fire hundreds of the currently employed workers after their probation period and replace them with new ones.

“By doing so, the factories won’t have to pay our wage for three months. They can then recruit new applicants amongst the migrants, put them through probation, and fire them again to appropriate their labour for free”, a worker said angrily. The migrant workers’ presence allows the factories to employ a strategy that villagers strongly resent but are unable to resist: to minimize the number of full-time employees, and instead exploit the device of probation and extract work from people for short periods, then sack them and recruit another intake, knowing there is a big supply of aspirants available to them. As long as those posters still stand, and around them are hundreds of migrant workers hungry for jobs, village workers know their current job is highly insecure.

Although factories cannot use the same exploitative tactic on workers with official labour contracts, these workers also firmly believe the migrant workers’ presence has substantially eroded their job security. To justify their anxiety, all mention the changing attitude of factory employers. In a visit to the garment factory, accompanied by a manager, I saw hundreds of workers, all working in absolute silence. The sounds of machines in operation were the only thing I heard. I recognized Trang, who had been working there for a year and was then on a one-year contract. As I had asked Trang for permission to interview her at work in advance, I asked the manager if I could ask her some questions, which he approved. Yet during our five-minute talk, Trang kept looking over my shoulder to surreptitiously check the manager’s attitude, and eventually suggested I continue the tour as she thought the manager was unhappy about her taking too much time off work.

That night Trang came to see me to apologize for abruptly ending the conversation: “I have to be careful, otherwise I may be scolded by the managers again, or even have my wage cut. The managers have become harsher recently”, she said, recalling that as the number of migrant job-seekers grew, the factory managers had become increasingly dictatorial towards them. Trang had had her wage cut twice for being late for only two minutes, and was once ruthlessly scolded by her managers for asking her co-workers the time. Such a draconian attitude had been absent during the park’s first year of operation, and even in Trang’s early months at work, when the number of migrants was smaller. Back then the managers were kinder to workers with official contracts than those on probation, smiling to them more frequently, and being more sympathetic if they were late for work. As Trang explained:

In the first year, they were nice to us, because they needed us. But now they are rude to us. It means they no longer need us as much as before, and can throw us out anytime they want, because there are thousands of migrants out there, waiting to replace us.

This growing sense of employment insecurity motivates village workers to take pre-emptive measures and prepare fall-back positions for themselves. That day Trang gave me a pair of crocheted pot-holders to thank me for occasionally looking after her children when she was at work. She made the pot-holders with a new sewing machine bought with her savings so that she could perform paid needlework for other villagers at home outside factory work time. “My husband and I agree that we must not only keep cultivating our holdings, but also find other income sources. In this situation, I don’t know when it will be my turn to be fired”, Trang said. So Xuan village workers retain low-value agricultural livelihoods and engage in new ones not because they are too conservative to abandon what the officials consider low-value agricultural strategies and are ignorant of the benefit of industrial modernity. By contrast, for them it is sensible to retain these diverse options as safety-nets to protect their families from the vagaries of greedy factory owners, who consider the workers merely a source of cheap labour to be squeezed for maximize profit and then ruthlessly discarded.

Insecurity spares nobody

Amongst village workers who shared their anxieties with me, Mr Vinh is a special case. He is one of the very few whom the officials consider a true example of the new modern worker. A year after Vinh started factory work, the employers realized he had the strength and agility to handle more complex tasks, hence sending him to a company-financed one-month training course to become a cutter. His new task was to cut large cloth rolls into proper sizes for lower-level workers to further process. Upon finishing the course, he was promoted to a high-level worker position and became one of the best paid in the factory, earning triple the basic-level wage.

In another visit to the garment company with Chairman Hung, he and the factory manager accompanying me introduced Vinh as a role model (điển hình gương mẫu), whose dedication to and success in factory work had set an example for other workers to follow. “He is industrious and has good skills, that’s why he gets the high-level position and high wage”, Hung said. “Keep up your good work, get more training to improve your expertise, then you will have an even better position”, Hung encouraged Vinh. The accompanying manager also told us in front of Vinh that they were considering Vinh for the even better paid position of shift manager.

So Vinh is amongst a minority of village factory workers whom the officials regard as possessing every reason to treat factory work as their sole livelihood and permanent occupational choice. Besides being one of the best paid workers with a good prospect of promotion and wage increase, he enjoys substantially more job security than most other workers, as his high skills make him valuable personnel for the company to keep rather than to ruthlessly discard.

Vinh kept nodding at Hung’s encouragement when we talked. Yet when visiting Vinh’s house some days later, I was surprised to meet Vinh and some other workers, all of whom had just returned from the district centre where they had registered for a car-driving course. This would be a fall-back option, Vinh explained, so he could apply for a job as a taxi driver when necessary.

Surprised by Vinh’s plan, I recalled our meeting with Chairman Hung and Vinh’s manager earlier, asking why he had to worry when I thought he had a very secure job. To my astonishment, although Vinh acknowledged that his position made him less exposed to the risk of dismissal than most other workers, he did not think he was immune from the insecurity of factory employment.

To prove his point, Vinh introduced me to one of the workers present. The latter was formerly a high-level worker in the light-bulb company, even better paid than Vinh. The man, however, had not been paid for three consecutive months, like all other workers because the company had been performing badly until that point. He complained that a Vietnamese manager in the company had even advised him to begin hunting for other jobs, as the foreign factory owners no longer found it profitable to continue operations, and would soon close the factory.

The light-bulb company’s grievous situation was totally unexpected for the hundreds of villagers in its employ. Just a year previously, villagers still thought that the company was thriving and would guarantee even more job security than the garment factory. To illustrate how quickly the situation had changed, all village workers referred to the factory’s transformed appearance. In the park’s first year of operation, in contrast to the residential area always dark at night, the factory stood out, being the most well-lit place in the park, its walls covered with colourful neon lights. However, by the end of my fieldwork, villagers accompanying me along the tarmac-surfaced lane surrounding the park at night showed me a totally different appearance: the factory covered in total darkness. The neon lights were still there, but had long been left unlit. Vinh’s friend told me sadly:

Who would expect that? When I got the job, everyone was jealous of my position and wage. Everyone thought the company would keep expanding, and I would never have to worry about the future. Yet now the company is dead. I used to manage the whole family with my wage, but recently we had to return to paddy farming.

For Vinh, the friend’s painful experience is a valuable lesson to be taken seriously. Vinh said that his managers had promised to promote him and raise his wages. However, he did not trust that promise, thinking the bosses were merely making false promises to motivate their employees to work harder, not real commitment to be taken at face value. And even if the managers would keep their promise, Vinh still felt uncertain. “They might not even take care of their own future, like those in the light-bulb company, let alone my future”, said Vinh, meaning that even the factory owners themselves could not predict how quickly things could change against the odds.

Consequently, Vinh is determined to pursue the car-driving course. For Vinh, obtaining a fall-back solution becomes even more important as he plans to get married soon:

My parents also agree with my decision to take the driving course. They told me I soon would have my own family to care for. So I must have as many income sources as possible. If I get a driving license, I can work as a part-time taxi driver at night after working in the factory. This will give me some more money besides my factory wage. More importantly, if my factory goes bankrupt and I lose my job, I won’t have to beg my parents for money to buy food for my wife and children.