VN news (July 6)

[Dam Son <son@fermi.phys.washington.edu>]

Vietnam Airlines suspends flights to Phnom Penh 
Traffic on Vietnam Airlines grew 8% in first 6 months
Australia launches major aid project in Vietnam 
Vietnam Workers Find Their Voice Labor: Strikes increase

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Vietnam Airlines suspends flights to Phnom Penh 

Hanoi, July 6 (AFP) - Vietnam Airlines said Sunday it had suspended its
service to Phnom Penh.

An airline employee at Tan Son Nhat Airport in Ho Chi Minh City said
direct flights to and from Phnom Penh had been cancelled "because of
civil war in Cambodia."

Vietnam Airlines, which operates daily flights said it did not know when
its service to the Cambodian capital would resume.

Cambodia's Pochentong International has been technically closed since
Saturday.

Cambodia flag-carrier Royal Air Cambodge, Malaysia Airlines Systems Bhd.,
Thai Airways and SilkAir from Singapore have also suspended services
to Phnom Penh.

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HIGH-FLYING AIRLINE: Passenger traffic on Vietnam Airlines grew nearly
8 per cent in the first six months of this year with the airline
carrying more than 1.3 million passengers, a report said yesterday.

The national carrier also transported 22,000 tonnes of freight in
the same period, the Lao Dong newspaper reported. The airline, one
of Vietnam's most profitable companies, serves 22 destinations inside
Vietnam and 23 abroad. -- AFP.

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Australia launches major aid project in Vietnam 

Hanoi (dpa) - Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Vietnamese
deputy prime minister Tran Duc Luong presided Sunday over a ground-breaking
ceremony of the My Thuan Bridge project, roughly 100 kilometers south
of Ho Chi Minh City.

The 1,535-meter-long bridge - the largest single Australian overseas
aid project - will link the major rice growing areas of the Mekong Delta
area with Ho Chi Minh City. The project is expected to be completed in
three years.

Australia will be contributing 45 million dollars to the total price
tag of 68 million dollars, which is about one-quarter of Canberra's aid
to Vietnam until the year 2000.

In July 1996 the Australian government decided to continue its funding
of a key bridge project in the Mekong Delta, whose threatened cut-off
had cast a shadow over the bilateral relations. The decision reversed
earlier comments by Prime Minister John Howard to review -with an intention
to canceling - the project.

While visiting Vietnam from July 2 to July 6 Alexander Downer held talks
with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Manh Cam, and met with Prime Minister
Vo Van Kiet and Minister of Planning and Investment Tran Xuan Gia. During
his talks in Hanoi Alexander Downer confirmed Australia's commitment
to developing long-term cooperation with Vietnam.

Australia's top diplomat reportedly voiced concern over the deteriorating
situation in neighbouring Cambodia Sunday. Alexander Downer said that
a crisis group was established in Canberra to monitor the situation in
order to guarantee the safety of Australian nationals in Cambodia.

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Vietnam Workers Find Their Voice Labor: Strikes increase as employees
at foreign-funded factories press for better conditions.
Government is caught in middle, needing outside investment but obliged
to protect its people.

By IAN STEWART
07/06/97
Los Angeles Times

CU CHI, Vietnam -- Workers of the world unite, implored communism's creator,
Karl Marx. And in communist Vietnam, that's just what they're starting
to do.

More than four decades after the communists came to power in northern
Vietnam, this country is facing unprecedented discontent in its labor
force.

Fed up with abusive foreign supervisors and sweatshop conditions, Vietnamese
are walking off the job in record numbers in a country where strikes
were illegal until three years ago.

Of the 24 legally recognized strikes during the first three months of
the year, 18 were in factories controlled by foreign investors.

The dilemma for Hanoi: How do you balance the country's growing dependency
on foreign investment with standing up for labor rights?

State news media have publicized some worker complaints to pressure foreign
business operations, but the government has remained neutral on the issues
of specific strikes, which often end with labor complaints unresolved.

Authorities are working on setting up labor courts to deal with disputes,
but so far, even with a labor code on the books to define worker rights
and employer obligations, enforcing the rules is proving an elusive goal.

"Strikes are occurring for different reasons. Primarily, we're seeing
that employers aren't protecting the rights of workers," said Phan Duc
Binh, a lawyer in the Labor Ministry. "Now we've got foreign investors
coming in who don't know anything about our rules."

*

In southern Vietnam, high-profile incidents of physical abuse against
employees at factories working under contract to the American footwear
giant Nike have fueled charges that foreign companies exploit Vietnamese
labor.

That and the growing disparity between Vietnam's neophyte capitalists
and the labor force underscore an awkward rift that begs the Communist
Party's authority and mandate.

"This is not only a country that needs foreign investment," Binh said.
"We need to build a system of law that protects the worker."

It is the ultimate contradiction in Vietnam, a self-professed workers'
haven.

Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese nationalists took on communism in the
1930s as a convenient ally in the fight against French colonial rule.

*

When North Vietnam proclaimed itself a communist republic in the 1950s,
it was scarcely an industrialized society--a basic requisite for communism.

Only now, as the economic doctrines of communist rule wane, is the country
beginning to develop heavy industry and a manufacturing capability. And
a labor movement is emerging, bringing demands for equality, respect
and a bigger share of the country's wealth.

Foreign investment is creating more and better-paying jobs, and the standard
of living in cities is on the rise--albeit modestly.

But more and more workers feel reduced to cogs in a machine directed
by foreign money and Vietnamese partners.

Fewer than 3,000 people nationwide went on strike in 1994. Two years
later, quadruple that number walked out in Ho Chi Minh City alone. The
trend is still on the rise.

"We often complain to our supervisors that we aren't machines, we're
human beings," said Ho Thi Thanh, a union representative at Nike's troubled
shoe operation in Cu Chi, 25 miles from Ho Chi Minh City.

Down a dust-choked road from the South Korean-owned Sam Yang Co. factory,
which works for Nike, Thanh balanced on a tiny plastic stool at a tea
stall and explained the difficulties at her troubled workplace.

In May, a line supervisor smacked a worker across the hip with the sole
of a Nike sneaker to make the employee work faster.

It was a repeat performance of a highly publicized incident last year,
when a South Korean floor manager used the rubber sole of a shoe to beat
an employee over the head. An ad hoc Vietnamese labor tribunal gave that
woman a three-month suspended prison term.

In late June, another Nike floor manager was sentenced to six months
behind bars for abusing workers. That decision came days after former
U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, hired by Nike to review its labor practices
in Asia, said he had uncovered incidents of abuse, but no widespread
pattern.

*

Nike insists labor relations are on the mend in its factories--all of
which are open to journalists only when accompanied by a Nike regional
executive from Hong Kong.

Thanh, however, said problems still plague Sam Yang. The factory's workers
are still without a group contract, leaving them vulnerable to random
firings with little recourse as a union, she said.

"Now if you complain, the supervisors begin looking for reasons to fire
you," she said.

Similar troubles are reported at factories in Ho Chi Minh City, the port
city of Haiphong and the capital, Hanoi.

Apart from outright abuse, many workers at both foreign-owned and state-run
companies complain of harsh working conditions and low wages.

On the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, thousands of young men and women
toil in the state-owned An Lac Footwear Co.

Even outside, the clatter of the factory's manual sewing machines is
deafening. The summer sun shining down on the factory's corrugated metal
roof can send the temperature inside soaring to nearly 100 degrees. Inside,
ceiling fans whirl in a futile effort to cut the suffocating heat.

Women are jammed along a series of assembly lines that churn out up to
7,000 pairs of shoes each day for Adidas, Fila and All-Star.

For their labors, employees at foreign-owned factories earn about 20
cents an hour, the minimum wage set by a government keen to attract foreign
investment.

Although foreign labor activists have focused attention on such wages,
by Vietnamese standards, the pay isn't bad, conceded Thanh, the union
representative at Sam Yang. It produces an annual income of roughly $600
a year, which is half the average income in Ho Chi Minh City but about
four times annual earnings in rural areas.

*

For Vietnam's one-party government, calming the uneasy laborers is a
delicate balancing act between ideology and pragmatism.

It is the influx of foreign investment that in many cases has salvaged
factories that atrophied under Vietnam's centrally planned economy.

Before South Vietnam fell in 1975, An Lac Footwear produced shoes for
Bata, a Canadian footwear company. With the communists ascendant in Vietnam,
An Lac became a primary supplier of shoe uppers for the Soviet Union.

In the mid-1990s, investment from Taiwan and South Korea saved the factory
with orders from major shoe companies from around the world.

"Since foreign employers came to Vietnam, they have offered more jobs,"
conceded Thanh, the Sam Yang worker. "But they are also bringing problems."

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