EC Meeting Papers January 2018

As the CPV is the ruling party, trade unions and workers in Vietnam have different forums to voice their concerns to protect and improve workers’ interests.

Trade unions maintain regular meetings with state and party top leadership to convey the most pressing issues of their members.

The prime minister of Vietnam speaks regularly with workers in industrial zones to listen to their concerns and respond to them and take measures to improve things and hold follow-up meetings to check implementation. In the context of globalisation, workers’ issues and concerns are more interconnected than they think. Multinational companies (MNCs) are the same employers of workers in different countries, including Vietnam and Britain. Workers in both countries are working in the global supply chains of the same MNCs. Workers and trade unions are facing with common global challenges — for example, climate change and the impact of the required transition to greener work; the future of work in the digitalisation era; the casualisation of employment; public spending cuts etc. The 200-year history of the British trade union movement in areas of collective bargaining, legal advice, health and safety, trade union education and so on is helpful for Vietnamese trade unions, which have only just over 20 years of dealing with the market economy. Both success and failure are fruitful to learn from for the newcomer. In turn, thanks to its political system, Vietnamese unions have achieved fairly good laws and regulations that British colleagues may consider helpful in their own struggle. More importantly, against the corporate superpowers, workers and trade unions in different countries cannot win the fight on their own, they must stand and fight hand in hand to eliminate the race to the bottom, in unity not separately, in solidarity not in competition.