Papers

• State, Mobility, and Labour Hierarchies in Post-Reform Rural Vietnam Thu Dinh University Milano-Bicocca

  This paper investigates the construction and contestation of labour value hierarchies in rural Vietnam amid intensifying global labour mobility. Although existing research has investigated Vietnamese migrant households’ strategic organisation and how their lives unfold over time and space, my contribution focuses on delineating how the value of labour is reiterated by various social actors in terms of money, moral worth, and national development narratives, and how these conceptualisations underpin the daily practices through which households engage in migration. Drawing on ethnographic research in a rural commune in central Vietnam marked by significant overseas migration, diverse characterisations of labour reveal generational and gendered tensions, as well as those between community and state’s development agenda. They also reveal the ways migration intensifies some social processes while destabilising others and resulting in variated social meanings attached to “valuable” work. The paper traces the subtle and often painful negotiations through which migrants, aspiring migrants, and especially those who remain behind, reckon with emerging regimes of value and recognition. Its critical intervention lies in showing how the valorization of global labour regimes not only transforms the material possibilities available to rural families but also recalibrates the temporalities of hope, belonging, and obligation, while producing new inequalities and exclusions in the process. Ultimately, the analysis demonstrates that understanding the contemporary reconstruction of home and futurity in post- reform rural Vietnam requires grappling with the unstable and contested politics of labour value, as these are lived, narrated, and felt across generations and social spaces.

• Making Logistics Margins: Vietnamese Seafarers in the Global Maritime Labour System Jessica Steinman Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam

  Vietnam is among the world’s top ten suppliers of seafarers. Yet, Vietnamese seafarers consistently occupy a marginal position in the global maritime labor hierarchy as they are excluded from the wages, protections, and career mobility available to their peers from other countries. Academic and popular discourses on Vietnamese seafaring acknowledge the structural conditions that produce this position, including Vietnam’s late entry into the global maritime labor market, an insufficient training infrastructure, and a longer training and credentialing pipeline than those of other seafaring nations. Yet this acknowledgment consistently resolves into narratives of individual shortcomings, as Vietnamese seafarers’ marginal position in the global seafaring labor market is attributed to their lack of professionalism, limited English, and insufficient work ethic. This resolution is sustained through a regulatory architecture that mandates dependence on private intermediaries while providing minimal oversight, and through moral frameworks that recast structural disadvantage as a problem of individual self-improvement. Drawing on 24 months of platform-based ethnography with Vietnamese seafarers, this paper traces how workers are recruited into and sustain these labor margins through aspirations cultivated under the ideological framework of market socialism. In doing so, it reveals that aspiration and moral obligation are central mechanisms through which the co-production of global capital, state regulation, and worker subjectivity reproduces these margins in global logistics.

• Productive Margins and Power Inversion: Vietnamese Migrant Networks and the Reconfiguration of Work and Life in Taiwan’s High-Altitude Agriculture Mei-Hsien Lee National Chi Nan University

  This study examines how Vietnamese margins are reproduced and reconfigured beyond Vietnam through undocumented migrant networks in Taiwan’s high-altitude agriculture. Focusing on Nantou, it situates migration within structural tensions between Taiwan’s rigid labor policies, severe agricultural shortages, and the transnational reorganization of work.
  Based on in-depth interviews, the paper identifies Vietnamese marriage immigrants as pivotal actors. Leveraging their citizenship and local ties, these women function as “invisible managers,” coordinating land leasing, labor recruitment, and market access. They facilitate an alternative labor infrastructure that operates outside formal state regimes while remaining central to local agricultural survival.
  This network has inverted traditional power dynamics: Taiwanese employers now depend on undocumented labor, often competing for workers through higher wages and incentives. Simultaneously, undocumented workers utilize TikTok and social media to organize mobile teams and circulate job information. While these workers frequently earn more than legal counterparts—often to repay debts in Vietnam—their lives remain defined by precarity, including legal insecurity, medical debt, and family separation.
  Ultimately, this paper argues that Taiwan’s high-altitude agriculture is sustained through these margins rather than despite them. The state’s selective enforcement unintentionally enables an extra-legal order that compensates for formal policy failures. By centering Vietnamese migrant networks as productive margins, this study contributes to discussions on how global capitalism reorganizes labor, legality, and survival across and beyond Vietnam.

Abstract

Keywords

• Labour hierarchies
• Taiwan
• Vietnamese migration
• logistics
• maritime labour
• migrant networks
• mobility
• rural Vietnam
• seafarers