Panel: Race to the bottom: Vietnamese female migrant workers’ & Market Socialism

7/2/26 LF Panel: Race to the bottom: Vietnamese female migrant workers’ vulnerability, double burden and health risks in market socialism

July 2 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm PDT
FREE
Zoom event

Since the 1990s, Vietnam’s export-led growth has relied heavily on young women migrating from rural areas to work in the world’s major manufacturing hubs for garment and footwear factories, and increasingly, electronics. Almost four decades later, many of these workers face growing insecurity as they age, still having to navigate unstable employment that fails to keep up with rising costs, while having to care for their children in poor-quality temporary migrant workers’ housing. Behind the country’s impressive economic growth figures, workers toil under exploitative conditions and low pay, creating vicious cycles of insecurity, forcing them to constantly search for jobs that could make ends meet. At the same time, the socialist state’s narratives of inclusive development and moral rhetoric of care for working people fail to deliver adequate social insurance with weakening social insurance policies to protect migrant workers at the bottom of the global supply chains from uncertainties in late-stage capitalism.

After screening one documentary and 3 migrant worker-initiated social media clips with their own voices, this session will discuss the impacts of Vietnam’s global integration on the everyday lives of the female migrant workers and how they seize possible work opportunities in a system fraught with risks, while trying to lead a dignified life for themselves and their families and to empower each other.

4 clips total (around 15 minutes)
First clip: Union of Catholic Asian News (7 min): Vietnam’s workers leave cities for rural hometowns as economic woes increase https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpHAA0jcZx8
3 Instagram clips: https://www.instagram.com/thaochonsonglanh?igsh=aWZvNTI5dzRxMzZ3
– Dinner of 13,000 VND (showing a meager dinner of a migrant mother and her two children, and their need for cultural entertainment)
– Dinner of 65,000 VND for a Migrant Mother and Two Children at a rental place in Bình Dương province (showing a lot of expenses that a migrant mother has to pay for her family)
– The process to create an Instagram channel (an initiative of a female migrant worker to use social media to document their lives and her willingness to share with others)

Angie’s bio:

Dr. Angie Ngọc Trần was born and raised in Saigon, Vietnam. She obtained a doctorate in political economy at the University of Southern California and has been teaching at CSU Monterey Bay since 1996. She has researched and published on transnational labor migration and resistance in Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as the farm guestworkers program between the US and Mexico. Her 2013 book, Ties that Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam’s Labor Resistance, chronicles over 100 years of labor movements, domestic labor migration, and resistance in Vietnam since French colonial rule to Vietnam’s market socialism in the 21st century. Her 2022 book, Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment: Economic Migration between Vietnam and Malaysia, integrates ethnicity, class, gender, religion and cultural resources, and third space of dissent and empowerment of five different ethnic groups in Vietnam while working as guestworkers in Malaysia and after they return to Vietnam. During and after Covid-19, she published articles to expose female worker vulnerabilities, exploitative and abusive working conditions and sexual violence, under the Vietnam-Saudi labor agreement that sends Vietnamese female workers to work as maids in Saudi Arabia. Her 2026 book chapter, “Weakening of Social Protection in Vietnam: Labor Legislation, Cicada Capital, Civil Society,” analyzes creeping marketization, privatization, and financialization of social protection in Vietnam, leaving workers scrambling to fend for themselves and their families. Her current project on “H-2A Mexican Agricultural Guestworkers: Navigating opportunities and risks in California and improving quality of life in Mexico” exposes not only employers’ control, exploitation and sexual harassment/violence, but also how farmworkers navigate the system to empower themselves, their families and communities.

Dr. Angie Ngọc Trần, Ph.D.
Professor, Political Economy
[She/her/ella/cô (in Vietnamese)]

Bio and Publications: https://researchprofiles.csumb.edu/en/persons/angie-ngoc-tran
Author of Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment: Economic Migration between Vietnam and Malaysia, University of Illinois Press, 2022
Ear to Asia Podcast (May 2024)
Social Sciences and Global Studies Department
California State University, Monterey Bay