As companies’ union officials are on company payroll, most of them would rather not risk losing their salaries to lead strikes, said participants at the meeting in Ho Chi Minh City Friday.
The meeting was held to discuss possible solutions to the growing number of walkouts in Vietnam.
Skyrocketing inflation, which hit 25 percent year-on-year last month, has outpaced wage increases and fueled strikes.
Workers have also staged walkouts against work overloads, poor benefits and harsh disciplinary actions.
Factories were hit by about 300 labor strikes in the first four months of 2008, the Vietnam General Labor Union (GLU) reported.
But none of the more than 2,300 strikes in Vietnam since 1995 have been led by company-level labor unions, which means they have all been illegal according to the Vietnamese Labor Law, said the GLU.
Nguyen Van Be, Party Secretary of the Tan Thuan Export – Processing Zone, said many labor officials were paper tigers who did not help workers organize legal strikes or protect their rights.
Dang Nhu Loi, vice director of the parliament’s Committee on Social Affairs, said a recent survey in the southern industrial hubs of Binh Duong, Dong Nai and HCMC showed that all labor union officials had been selected by local company leaders, not the workers.
“Without money or authority, how can labor unions protect workers?” Be said.
Truong Thi Mai, Director of the Committee on Social Affairs, speculated that maybe the “unions have been on the business owners’ side, not the workers’.”
Mai asked whether or not union staff would dare to lead workers on a strike if the conditions were ripe, to which Truong Lam Danh, vice president of the Ho Chi Minh City Labor Union, replied, “honestly, it’s unthinkable.”
Many local administrations have chosen to deal with strikes without dealing with the unions, whom they see as having no autonomous authority anyway.
HCMC authorities, for example, have planned to appoint city officials as labor union leaders in 40 major enterprises with over 1,000 staff each.
Mai said such “temporary measures” could be used now but should be kept at a minimum in the long-term.
“The best solution is negotiations [between workers and employers] through the unions,” she said.
She said that labor unions would also have to change the way they operate in order to help solve the country’s labor problems.
Source: Tuoi Tre |
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