Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vietnam is a one-party state with a single state-led union federation and significant numbers of wildcat strikes. In January 2021, independent worker representative organisations became legal. The reforms are creating significant excitement among labour watchers and practitioners. This article, however, provides a more sceptical tone. Drawing on Atzeni’s critique of trade union fetishism, I argue that, rather than being a progressive step forward, freedom of association reforms are an attempt to reduce labour militancy. First, Vietnam is implementing reforms while further embedding itself into neo-liberal capital flows and global production networks – the very form of capitalism that undermined trade unionism elsewhere. Second, workers have been using effective forms of self-organised, wildcat militancy for two decades, which has led to significant improvements in terms of wages, conditions and national policy. The current organisational form of wildcat strikes does not easily fit into a worker representative organisation (WRO) structure. Third, because existing forms of resistance have worked, workers have not been demanding independent organisations. Rather, such demands have come from capital. Previous attempts to build harmonious labour relations by reducing militancy through incorporating class antagonisms into non-threatening forms have failed. Consequently, capital has now embraced ideas around freedom of association as an attempt to tame worker resistance. KEYWORDS: Strikes; unions; freedom of association; Vietnam; WROs
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".