In the summer of 2008, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) and adjacent Dong Nai Province in south Vietnam were experiencing an unprecedented proliferation of labour conflicts. One trade union leader in HCMC remarked, “this is the most chaotic change in labour–management relations since Doi Moi”. In the last week of July 2008, at least thirty factories in Dong Nai Province alone were undergoing strikes, while many factories in the industrial zones (IZs) and Export Processing Zones (EPZs) in the greater HCMC area, such as Bien Hoa I, Bien Hoa II, Long Thanh, and Linh Trung, had experienced labour disputes. The strikes were mainly in foreign-invested multinational factories and aimed at commercial or production disruption to protest low wages. Although they were illegal, the strikes were nonviolent and peacefully resolved.

To understand the nature of current labour–management conflicts and strikes, this chapter attempts to analyze the process of empowerment and disempowerment of the workers at a micro level in one foreign-invested joint-venture factory. As Hansson (2003, p. 175) postulates, if “conflicts occur outside the formal structure of the partystate and are still dealt with in an ad hoc manner largely depending on the local power configuration where conflicts take place”, then we need to explore how that local power is configured. Another question is whether there are consistent structural characteristics behind the “ad hoc manner” in which labour–management conflicts are dealt with.

This study will focus on the history of a factory, SIL, that had been a joint-venture between a private Korean company and a Vietnamese state-owned corporation for sixteen years, and was recently sold to private Vietnamese owners.