Labor Disputes and Industrial Unrest in the Czechoslovak–Vietnamese Migrant Labor Program

While growing, literature on labor migration into the erstwhile state-socialist countries in East-Central Europe before 1990 continues to be modest. One aspect that is notably missing from it is the recognition of migrant workers’ agency in regard to the defense of their rights and interests. In this paper, I use a set of unique empirical materials—a rumor, a police file, and an oral history interview—(a) to show that and how Vietnamese workers in 1980s Czechoslovakia fought for their rights, and (b) to analyze the structural features of the Vietnamese-Czechoslovak labor migration program that made this resistance possible.

Using this empirical material, I reconstruct and analyze a 12-day strike organized by a group of (primarily) female Vietnamese workers in a Czechoslovak plant cultivation company in the spring of 1983. The strike was not only a clash between the workers and the management, it was also a clash of two socialisms, and as such it revealed different conceptualizations of such crucial questions as fairness, (socialist) work ethic, and socialist internationalism. Thanks to the rich historical documentation, the strike provides us with a unique and valuable window into the lives of (female) Vietnamese workers in 1980s Czechoslovakia. It is also an event whose analysis allows us to identify the key structural features of the Vietnamese-Czechoslovak labor migration program and thus shed light on state-socialist labor migration more generally, and through it, also on the nature of late-state socialism in Central Europe.