Workplace Justice

This book develops an understanding of workplace justice and labour rights in Vietnam from factory workers’ voices and their resistance against abuse and exploitation. Through interviews with workers and a close analysis of their letters and petitions to the unions and state authorities, Nguyen illuminates how workers’ resistance is enabled and stifled by the legal and political systems that are supposed to protect their rights and benefits.  Their calls for justice reflect socialist ideology and widely held norms within society, as well as ideals and values embedded in labour law. The book demonstrates how state law brings about social change through shaping workers’ expectations and increasing consciousness of rights and justice. 
This book will be of interest to scholars of law, politics and society, and scholars, students and practitioners interested in labour rights in developing countries.

Tu Phuong Nguyen is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University.

​“In this book, workers get to speak for themselves. Drawing on their words, this study shows that underpinning numerous strikes and other resistance in the factories of Vietnam today is a blend of workers’ grievances, their  understanding of labor law, and their ideas about justice.” (Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University, Author of Speaking Out in Vietnam: Public Political Criticism in a Communist Party-Ruled Nation)

“In Workplace Justice, Tu Phuong Nguyen shows how law matters to daily struggles and survival in socialist Vietnam. Her empirically grounded research captures the interactions between labour law and factory workers’ sense of morality and ideas about justice, and details how the interactions shape the way workers portray and seek redress for their grievances. This book will appeal to scholars and practitioners interested in Vietnam, workers’ rights or legal mobilization.” (Lynette J. Chua, Associate Professor, National University of Singapore, Author of The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life and Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights & Resistance in an Authoritarian State)

"Workplace Justice makes a timely contribution to analyses of how industrial workers’critical awareness of both legal rights and the limitations of the legal system propels individual

and collective action. In addition to its obvious importance to Vietnam specialists, the book will appeal to scholars of law and labor, especially in post-/late/market socialist contexts.

• Ann Marie Leshkowich (College of the Holy Cross), in in the Journal of Asian Studies"