Protest in the Zones
Workers in Vietnam's export processing sector
Part Il The Maoist project tested in the struggle for power
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Despite the Party-state's strategy of enforcing militarised discipline among workers and maintaining industrial peace in the Export Processing Zones, 1997 saw an increasing number of strikes. Gerard Greenfield It is an irony of history that Vietnam's first Export Processing Zone (EPZ), created to integrate Vietnam into the global capitalist economy, arose from a partnership between the Vietnamese Communist Party and Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang -the party of Chiang Kai Shek.
No doubt their common Stalinist heritage enabled them to negotiate this partnership with ease, consolidating the privilege and power of the ruling bureaucratic elite through new Zones of global capitalist accumulation and the unrestrained exploitation of 'cheap' labour.
The Tan Thuan EPZ was established in Ho Chi Minh City in 1991 as a joint venture between the Vietnamese government and the Central Trading and Development Corporation (CT&D), owned by the KMT. In 1966, CT&D built the Kaoshung EPZ in Taiwan - Asia's first EPZ.
Three decades later the severe exploitation of workers in the Tan Thuan EPZ was foreshadowed in its construction, when over 300 migrant workers were illegally brought into Vietnam from mainland China to build the electric power station in the Zone. It was also clear that real power lay with the CT&D. The Vietnamese Deputy Director of the Tan Thuan EPZ (representing the Vietnamese government) asserting that "all operations here are directed by the general director in
For Taiwan's capitalists and the island's ruling elite, the creation of the Tan Thuan EPZ in Vietnam was part of a strategy of offshore relocation and "hollowing-out" - undercutting the independent labour movement and crushed the militant workers" Kaoshung EPZ. Nearly 30,000 workers were laid off in Kaoshung EPZ from 1987 to 1992, at the same time that Taiwanese capital was moving into Vietnam.
Since its creation the Vietnamese such as the Dai Tu EPZ, which is 100% Taiwanese-owned. In a further shift away from state regulation of foreign capital, a number of projects licensed as EPŹs were permitted to re-register as IZs. Some EPZs, like the Danang EPZ established by Malaysian capital, are referred to as both an EPZ and an IZ, which enables them to evade existing regulations on EPZs.
IZs provide many of the incentives of EPZs, with even less governmental regulation. That can mean 45-year leases, tax holidays of two to four years, reduced tax rates and fees, and reduced taxes for companies exporting at least 80% of production. Combined with the freedom to sell products (including scrap and waste) on
Most important of all, companies in IZs operate under a quasi-private Zone Authority, dominated by private foreign interests. In fact an increasing number of IZs are privately owned, like the O Cach Industrial Zone which is wholly owned by South Korean capital. This gives transnational capital unprecedented freedom from
Even if an IZ is a joint venture with the local government, such as the NomuraHaiphong Industrial Zone, real power lies with the foreign joint venture partner. Ultimately the Japanese financial conglomerate, Nomura, will "regulate" capital in the Zone and exercise control over its 30,000
The 1995 Labour Code is supposed to apply to all workplaces throughout the country, regardless of whether or not they are located in EPZs or IZs. In practice, only the disciplinary and repressive elements of the labour laws and regulations are used in the Zones. Meanwhile. local labour departments and trade union federations have come to play a central role in maintaining industrial peace by condemning 'wild-cat' strikes by workers and intervening to resolve disputes through closed-door negotiations with management. These negotiations exclude the workers themselves, and the 'solutions' arrived at invitably fail to meet their
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Of course, the enforcement of industrial peace at the cost of workers' rights and interests reflects the underlying logic of the Zones: to attract foreign capital using a cheap, compliant labour force. This occurs through the context of a partnership of interests between foreign capital and the Party-state (and the trade unions under its control); a partnership institutionalised in the Tan Thuan EPZ, where the President of the Zone is also an executive committee member of the Ho Chi Minh City Federation of Labour.
As the authoritarian Communist Party regime oversees the transition to capitalism in Vietnam, an important continuity remains. The emphasis on industrial discipline - the imposition of time-work discipline and control from above - which underpinned the Party-state's Stalinist industrialisation strategy in the past is now consolidated under its programme of capitalist industrialisation. This is manifested in the EPZs and IZs where a militarised regime of production within the Zones reinforces the 'whip of capitalism' outside the Zones, the whip of mass unemploy-
The official discourse on industrial discipline is reflected in a report by an economist from the National Centre for Social Sciences, Thanh Luu, on a visit to the Tan Dinh An Industrial Zone:
"From afar, we saw a big group of women workers, in blue and yellow uniforms, marching in steady steps under the
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION government has presented the Tan Thuan EPZ as a successful model for attracting foreign capital - a model which underpins the rapid increase in EPZs and Industrial Zones (IZs) throughout the country, with 350,000 workers now employed in 41 Zones. In the beginning of 1997, the Party-state intensified its drive to create even better conditions for foreign capital by allowing 100% foreign-owned EPZs,
Part | The Chinese Revolution and the Shaping of the Maoist Outlook