Labour Law and (In)justice in Workers’ Letters in Vietnam, Tu Phuong Nguyen
Many other types of written records on disputes and claims exist outside of the courts and offer alternative sources of data for law and society research. Nguyen, for instance, examines a unique dataset of complaint letters, one of which was featured in her article extracted in Chapter 5.
The analysis of these letters formed an integral part of her multi-method study on the legal mobilization of Vietnamese factory workers.The main source of data for this article is a set of workers' collective complaint letters sent to the provincial Labour Federation and three upper-level unions in Dong Nai Province, an industrial hub in the south of Vietnam. At those offices, I read through all letters, lodged in 2013 and 2014, and I selected for analysis those letters concerned with collective grievances - grievances related to workplace relations that affect a group of workers. This selection is due to my initial interest in studying how consciousness manifests in workers' binding with each other in their collective acts of resistance. Among the 21 selected letters, r6 letters only contain workers' self ascription as “workers in the company/section X” without any signature. In two out of those 16 letters, the writers stated clearly that they refrained from revealing their names and staff members for fear of losing their jobs. Three letters were written and signed by one person on behalf of a group. Only two letters contained multiple signatures of ten and 18; one of them also contains a list of complainants' names. The analysis also includes one letter published in full in Lao Bong (The Labour), the national labour newspaper, in 2010 and headlined as “a worker's letter full of grief.” Addressed to the VGCL Chairman, the writer clearly identified her name, work position, and the name of her company.
The letters vary in their titles and writing styles.
The majority of them, exactly eight letters, are entitled “request letter” (dm de nghi / kien nghi^). All of them contain the writers' request for the union's and/or management's consideration of the issues they raise. Another eight letters are entitled “complaint letter” (don khieu nai). Among them, only three writers state their intent of “suing” (kien) and “complaining” (khieu nai) the supervisors/managers, while the rest talk at length about the issues of concern and request some intervention from the state and union. The third group, four out of 21 letters, are entitled “letter requesting resolution/ assistance” (dm xin xem xet giai quyet / trσ giup) and only one is presented as a “report letter” (dm tr'nh). The styles and structures of letters in all the groups are relatively the same. As can be seen from their titles, not all the letters are explicitly of a resistance nature; nevertheless, the language that appears throughout the texts suffices to speak of workers' complaints or demands and their wish to rectify existing problems. Even though some of the request letters do not put forth any blame or make any accusations, they are presented in a manner that shows workers' disagreement and dissatisfaction with the businesses' decision.All letters were lodged by workers across 16 companies, with three companies each having two letters raising similar issues. From the dates in those letters, I find that, in two company cases, the letters were written in two consecutive dates; in the other case, they were written six months apart. All these companies belong to the footwear, garment, electronics, and woodprocessing industries, and plastic, metal, and chemical production. The numbers of employees in these companies range from 170 to more 18,000.
Most of the letters appeal to the union and state officials, whom workers address in a respectful manner. Fifteen letters provide detailed stories and impassioned accounts of the situation of the complainants and their affected fellow workers. The rest merely make brief summaries of their problems and requests.
About two-thirds of those 15 letters contain comprehensive depictions and stories of workers' experiences on the shop floor. On a close reading, I also find that three letters, entitled “request letter,” were initially directed to the company management and were about workers' demands for a higher wage rise. They made their way to the union offices to serve as evidence that workers had previously appealed to the management in vain.The translation of the letters to English is a fascinating but challenging experience to me as a native Vietnamese speaker. Many of them contain long sentences, sometimes without breaks or commas, spoken language, and shorthand, and at times vague references to the actors or subjects of particular actions, which are all understandable, since most letters were presumably written by the authors in a tense and distressful situation. In my translation, I have refined the grammar of long sentences to make them easy to follow, but I have kept intact the writers' rhetorical devices such as rhetorical question or exclamation. Some ambiguous references can be surmised from reading the surrounding texts. I have tried to literally translate the lay language and common expressions when I could not find the English equivalent. While all efforts have been made to preserve the writers' original meaning, my translation may not have done justice to the feelings and emotions conveyed within the letters, especially through exclamatory and emphatic words.
Besides court records and petition letters, law and society scholars locate and examine a variety of other written materials. Cheesman (Crime and Justice, Chapter 8), for example, assembled a diverse collection of texts and documents for his study on rule of law in Myanmar, Opposing the Rule of Law (2015). They included criminal case records, law reports, statutes, rules and official notifications, government gazettes and periodicals, news reports in and outside Myanmar, official and semi-official histories, Burmese reference books on criminal codes, a police manual that sets out the police forces' official structure and routine operations, handbooks and manuals for courts, civil servants and lawyers, records of seminars and congress of the Burma Socialist Programme Party, the ruling party from 1962 to 1988 and the only legal party from 1964 to 1988, articles on party ideology and policy, university textbooks and syllabi, judicial officers' promotion exam papers, and biographies:
Clearly, the book relies heavily on written sources.
This emphasis is deliberate.Writing is not merely a by-product of state activity. Modern bureaucratic states are constituted through writing. Even more than edifices of stone, accumulations of paper assert the know-how of rule. And perhaps to a greater degree than in any other areas of state activity, juridical practices bind their subjects, and one another, through written record keeping. Each moment in a juridical or administrative process brings forward a document or form for someone to complete and place on file. These forms are the materials of procedure, the records of sequential events. But they are also expressions of power. Mastery of the written text enables control of its subjects. When an official removes a document for completion from his cardboard folder, when a policeman pulls a notebook and click-pen from his shirt pocket, he opens up another world: a world of documentation that the object of record keeping may understand little, and can control even less. Out of these commonplace events come the materials with which Myanmar's courts make law and order.
(13-14)