Vietnamese Labour Mobility in a Regional and Historical Context

Precolonial labour relations in Southeast Asia included various forms of (captive) slavery and bonded servitude (Derks Reference Derks2010; Reid Reference Reid1983). One feature of early Vietnamese society was the huge gap between the landlord class – the mandarins – and their dependent peasants. The sociopolitical organisation was built on systems of corvée labour and peasant mobilisation during periods of warfare. Nineteenth-century peasants were obliged to undertake heavy labour in the mandarins’ rice fields, digging irrigation canals and dykes, in some cases for 48 days per year (Bunout Reference Bunout1936: 28; cf. Taylor Reference Taylor2013). New land legislation under the Nguyễn dynasty aggravated asymmetries in agricultural labour relations, resulting in exploitative latifundia capitalism under French colonialism (Brocheux and Hémery Reference Brocheux and Daniel2009: 121).

After the abolition of slavery, variants of servitude and coerced labour persisted in French-Indochina. The category coolie referred to three forms of bonded labour: 1) the ad hoc recruitment of porters, often uplanders employed by force; 2) ‘traditional’ corvée requisitions (e.g. for colonial public works), directed against lowland Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer peasants as well as upland shifting cultivators; and 3) indentured labour, mainly in the plantation and mining sectors of the colonial economy, with Chinese and Vietnamese labourers working under three-year contracts. The category of coerced labour that the French called corvée, the obligation to work for the state, resembled earlier relations of servitude between landlord and serf (Jennings Reference Jennings2011; Tappe Reference Tappe, Damir-Geilsdorf, Lindner, Müller, Tappe and Zeuske2016).

At the turn of the twentieth century, the French colonial administration in Indochina expressed concern about “the labour problem” (“le problème de la main-d'oeuvre”; see the title of Pasquier Reference Pasquier1918), in particular the recruitment of workers for the new, labour-intensive plantation and mining economies. A system of indentured labour – mainly Vietnamese labourers from Tonkin working on three-year contracts in southern Indochina, Laos, and the Pacific Islands – was established to meet rising labour demands; it also provided a solution to the alleged problems of poverty and overpopulation in the Red River Delta (see Aso Reference Aso2018; Bunout Reference Bunout1936; Gourou Reference Gourou1955; Hardy Reference Hardy2003).

‘Coolie’ labour became a crucial aspect of French economic development strategies and inadequate French attempts to create a cost-effective colony (Klein Reference Klein, Klein and Laux2012; Murray Reference Murray1980). A program of economic development (mise en valeur; see Sarraut Reference Sarraut1923), especially in the plantation, mining, and infrastructure sectors, gained momentum under the administration of the gouverneur général, Paul Doumer (1897–1902). Economic development was part of the colonial mission civilisatrice, which set out to modernise economic practices, modes of thought, and social relations, in part by disciplining the minds and bodies of labourers, in accordance with the norms and requirements of industrial production (Brocheux and Hémery Reference Brocheux and Daniel2009; Conklin Reference Conklin1997).

During the early twentieth-century rubber boom, cultivated acreage in southern Indochina skyrocketed from 1,800 hectares in 1910 to 61,000 hectares by the 1920s (Bunout Reference Bunout1936: 12). The rubber industry employed some 70,000 coolies, mainly contractual workers from Tonkin and Annam. Labour migration reached a peak in the 1920s, with an annual average of more than 12,000 Vietnamese moving from densely populated Tonkin to the south, and around 2,000 Vietnamese moving to the Pacific islands (Delamarre Reference Delamarre1931; Tully Reference Tully2011). In Cochinchina and Cambodia, rubber was cultivated on small plantations run by local notables, with Vietnamese corporals (cai) supervising groups of workers. Rubber was also grown on large estates, with more than 1,000 hectares of land, owned by French companies such as Michelin (Aso Reference Aso2012, Reference Aso2018). In Tonkin, the administration identified high labour demand for irrigation and dyke construction, recruiting between 50,000 to 60,000 labourers in 1927–28 (Bunout Reference Bunout1936: 33).Footnote ¹

The construction of roads, canals, and other infrastructure, including the famous Hanoi-Kunming railroad (25,800 workers in 1907 according to Bunout Reference Bunout1936: 32; cf. Del Testa Reference Del Testa2001), required a large workforce, drawn from populations of Vietnamese peasants and artisans, Chinese coolie migrants, and indigenous groups inhabiting the Lao-Vietnamese upland frontier. Here, a combination of taxation, corvée, and arbitrary labour requisitions, sometimes implemented through sheer force, was justified by the alleged reticence of local labourers. As Jennings (Reference Jennings2011: 4) has dramatically illustrated, using the example of the Dalat hill station in the Central Vietnam highlands, the colonial infrastructure “was literally built on the backs of Vietnamese and indigenous minority laborers and peasants”.Footnote ²

Vietnamese mobility was fostered by a policy that encouraged “Annamese colonisation” (Goscha Reference Goscha2012: 24) of the fertile Mekong basin, populated by Lao (and Khmer) peasants (cf. Ivarsson Reference Ivarsson2008). The French administration viewed the Vietnamese ‘race’ as more industrious and intelligent than the Lao or Khmer peoples.Footnote ³ Racialised stereotypes and colonial economic-development strategies encouraged Vietnamese migration within French Indochina. The colony witnessed both spontaneous, uncontrolled migrations and state-organised ones, as in the case of the plantation economy.

The reasons for Vietnamese (im)mobility during the colonial period are manifold. Although the peasants’ precarious livelihoods were a key factor, rural poverty cannot explain everything, as Hardy (Reference Hardy2003) points out in his seminal study of Vietnamese mobility. Vietnamese “cultures of mobility” (Hardy Reference Hardy2003: 100) incorporated optimism and the hope of attaining increased social status, wealth, and education, as well as an adventurous spirit. Labour mobility was and remains a way of earning resources to start a family, buy land or a house, and gain higher status after returning to the village. The combination of precarious socioeconomic conditions at home, and alternative livelihood options under colonial capitalism, enticed many young men (and far fewer women) to leave their villages, risking new situations of precarity, as will be discussed below.

While the colonial period was characterised by organised indentured labour and relatively small-scale spontaneous migrations, internal migration in Vietnam increased after national independence. Hardy (Reference Hardy2003) has demonstrated how the First Indochina War eradicated previous colonial-administrative barriers to migration; this change led to large-scale and organised migration to new economic zones in the 1960s and 1990s. Emerging labour relations and migration patterns in Vietnam produced new forms of precariousness.

As market liberalisation began to increase in the late 1980s, while economic reform policies (đổi mới) reduced state subsidies, new incentives for internal and transnational migration emerged (Anh et al. Reference Anh Nguyen Tuan, Rigg, Thu Huong and Dieu2012; Chan 2011; Luong Reference Luong Hy Van2010; Nguyen Reference Nguyen2015). However, obstacles, including the socialist household registration system (hộ khẩu), remained; neoliberal tendencies toward the informalisation of labour produced new precarities (Arnold Reference Arnold2012; Tran Reference Tran2013). Neighbouring Laos, meanwhile, became an alternative destination for Vietnamese labour migrants facing poverty, competition, and precariousness at home. Currently, the booming Laotian construction sector is intensifying labour demands and creating new opportunities – and risks – for Vietnamese workers.

The following two sections investigate articulations of precariousness, agency, and resilience in the everyday lives and experiences of Vietnamese labour migrants in the longue durée, from colonial coolies to contemporary transnational migrants. This approach aims to explore “the dialectical interplay between human agency and structural forces in specific labor migration settings” (Kitiarsa Reference Pattana2014: 130). By adopting a comparative historical perspective, this article develops new insights into the ways in which migrants perceive and endure precarious conditions and face insecurity and uncertainty as they carve out spaces of protection and autonomy in potentially hostile environments. The discussion begins with the precarity of colonial coolie labourers and then provides an ethnographic analysis of contemporary patterns of precarity and resilience among Vietnamese migrants in Laos.

Part I: Coolie Precarity

The coolie system became a key pillar of the French colonial economy and a means of social control and discipline; in this, it was similar to the labour systems employed by other colonial powers (Brocheux and Hémery Reference Brocheux and Daniel2009; Klein Reference Klein, Klein and Laux2012; Tully Reference Tully2011). Although indentured labour, unlike chattel slavery, was considered legal and ‘voluntary’, it entailed a tremendous amount of unfreedom and coercion (Behal and van der Linden Reference Behal and van der Linden2006; Derks Reference Derks2010). Commercial colonial interests saw coolies as disposable, racially inferior labour – “indolent children” in the words of the notorious labour recruiter, Alfred Bazin (Brocheux and Hémery Reference Brocheux and Daniel2009: 192).Footnote ⁴

The inherent violence of this system was a key factor in the precariousness of coolie lives. The precarious lives of Vietnamese peasants provide a historical context for migrant labour precarity under French colonialism. According to French administrators, the Red River Delta was particularly overpopulated and poverty-stricken (Gourou Reference Gourou1955); for this reason, the region was targeted by the mining and plantation economies, located in less populated regions, where labour recruitment was difficult. French policies promoting latifundia capitalism (Brocheux and Hémery Reference Brocheux and Daniel2009) produced and intensified precarious conditions in rural Vietnam, despite being promoted as a ‘solution’ to the region's urgent economic and demographic challenges.

Pre-colonial Vietnam was a feudal society consisting of a land-holding aristocracy and a mass of small tenants. French administrative interventions, including a new land code that privileged large landowners, aggravated the situation (see Cleary Reference Cleary2003; Hardy Reference Hardy2003). Wealthy Vietnamese landlords collaborated with the French and accumulated farmland, while a growing, subordinate class of tenant farmers emerged, often working under sharecropping contracts with detailed conditions imported from France. The class of poor Vietnamese tenant farmers was dispossessed, often hopelessly indebted, and thus open to signing coolie contracts (see Brocheux and Hémery Reference Brocheux and Daniel2009).

The extensive documentation produced by various colonial surveys (enquêtes) in the 1920s and 1930s, most prominently the Guernut Commission, includes accounts of socioeconomic conditions in colonial Indochina. For example, one undated petition submitted by the inhabitants of two villages in Annam explicitly complains that “the peasants are exploited by the landlords and usurers”.Footnote ⁵ The report accuses landowners of renting out land for certain sums of silver as well as 50–66 per cent of the harvest. Tenants were obliged to work for their landlords for a specified number of days and to offer diverse services and benefits during holidays and anniversaries (cf. Bunout Reference Bunout1936). If peasants borrowed rice or capital from a landlord during a rice shortage, the latter could demand excessive interest rates of up to 50 per cent.

This example illustrates the conditions of rural precarity in precolonial and colonial Vietnam. Many peasants became indebted to their landlords, ending up in a situation of debt bondage and extreme dependency.Footnote ⁶ The precarious conditions were aggravated by climatic hazards, including floods, droughts, and resulting famines. As peasants also owed money to moneylenders who roamed the countryside, they were easy targets for professional recruiters – “a parasitic industry” (Monet Reference Monet1930: 41; translation by author) – working for plantation and mining enterprises.Footnote ⁷ Attracted by good salaries (by local standards) and cash advances, Vietnamese peasants became ‘coolies’ who were legally tied to their employers and subject to strict regulations and arbitrary, racialised violence.

Jennings (Reference Jennings2011), in his seminal history of the Dalat hill station in the highlands of Central Vietnam, provides numerous disturbing examples of abuse carried out within allegedly ‘traditional’ labour regimes, which were used to justify the relentless exploitation of indigenous labour, indicating a colonial “culture of violence” (Tully Reference Tully2011: 252). Structural violence was inherent in the logic of colonial relations, which “favored arbitrary and brutal conduct toward the natives, whether they were coolies, peasants, laborers, or white-collar workers. A European might believe he had the right to beat, sometimes fatally, a worker whom he perceived to be lazy or rebellious” (Brocheux and Hémery Reference Brocheux and Daniel2009: 193).

Tran Thu Binh's book, Red Earth (Reference Binh1985 [Reference Binh1965]), is one of the best-known first-hand accounts of precarious coolie existence. Like other famous examples of this genre (cf. Lulofs Reference Lulofs1993), the book illustrates racialised forms of colonial discrimination, humiliation, and violence. Binh's narrative also reveals an anti-colonial, communist ideology (the author later became a leading party functionary), showing how the precarious coolie experience shaped new perceptions of the world and fostered radicalisation (cf. Ngo Van 1998; Tai Reference Tai1992; Truong Reference Truong2000). Other insightful, non-ideological contributions to this genre include the novels of Jean Vanmai (Reference Vanmai1980; Reference Vanmai1983), which are dedicated to the history of Vietnamese coolie migration to the Pacific Islands of New Caledonia.Footnote ⁸ Such sources provide valuable insights into the everyday challenges faced by coolie labourers in search of a decent life. They complement archival sources, which rarely reflect the coolies’ own perspective.

Binh provides dramatic descriptions of the various corporal punishments that coolies endured at the hands of their overseers, “the terrible, cruel demons of this hell on earth” (Binh Reference Binh1985[Reference Binh1965]: 24). The labourers were forced to work from six to six with only one short break. Many suffered from exhaustion, injuries caused by workplace accidents, relentless beatings from overseers, malaria, and dysentery. A large number of coolies died, becoming “fertilizer for the capitalists’ rubber trees” (Binh Reference Binh1985[Reference Binh1965]: 27).Footnote ⁹ According to the anti-colonial pamphlet, Les Jauniers, suicide rates were high among the miserable coolies, with up to ten suicides per month on certain plantations (Monet Reference Monet1930: 26).

Coolie contracts specified severe punishments for ‘insubordination’, which could mean anything, even fainting from exhaustion. The least offence or mistake was “punished in a brutal way. [The coolies] are beaten with batons, with canings of the feet […] and are obliged to pay fines in silver” (Monet Reference Monet1930: 31–32; cf. Aso Reference Aso2018: 102–3). Brutal foremen – some of whom were French army veterans or had worked in the Belgian Congo (Tully Reference Tully2011: 107) – considered beating coolies a legitimate way to enforce labour discipline. The Belgian overseer Verhelst was particularly notorious for arbitrarily beating coolies with canes and whips (Ngo Van 1997: 412).

According to Marianne Boucheret (Reference Boucheret2001), the Ministry of Colonies opened a proverbial Pandora's Box in 1926, when it began a large-scale inquiry into colonial labour conditions, covering both legal and social issues. Numerous reports revealed the plight of Vietnamese coolies, who endured scandalous sanitary and medical conditions, miserable housing, and insufficient nourishment; they also faced severe corporal punishment for the slightest offence.Footnote ¹⁰ However, the legal reforms that followed tended to maintain and justify the coolie system, rather than protecting workers, despite increasingly critical public opinion in Indochina and the metropole (Aso Reference Aso2018; Boucheret Reference Boucheret2001, Reference Boucheret2008).

Michelin's Mimot plantation – where the brutal overseer Verhelst terrorised labourers – was notorious for excessive violence and cases of mass desertion that were severely punished (cf. Kalikiti Reference Kalikiti2000). One report described work conditions in 1927 as “still lamentable”Footnote ¹¹, in spite of earlier attempts to implement labour protections. Even local Khmer notables complained about mistreatment of Tonkinese coolies at the hands of overseers, who acted like “buffalo herders”Footnote ¹². When Verhelst was removed from the plantation for his countless transgressions (Tully Reference Tully2011: 255), the Mimot company protested his dismissal.

Interestingly, cases of coolie counter-violence and spontaneous strikes seem to have increased during the years following the reforms, perhaps because they became more visible and were therefore recorded by labour inspectors and anti-colonial newspapers (cf. Aso Reference Aso2012: 29). Moreover, Vietnamese workers were increasingly aware of their legal rights and refused to accept arbitrary violence and exploitation. Reports leaked to the anti-colonial press about strikes, attacks, and sabotage against overseers helped to underpin coolie resilience. Between 1929 and 1937, colonial sources noted conflicts on various rubber plantations in southern Indochina, for example:

• – 10 September 1929: Strike on the plantation of Song-Rây after the direction ignored new regulations concerning work schedules and did not provide the agreed rice rations. Numerous reports of violence between (both French and Vietnamese) overseers and workers.

• – 6 March 1930, Quan-Loi: Worker dies after heavy canings by overseer.

• – 11 October 1930, Thuân-Loi: Indigenous overseer pushes a worker who falls and succumbs to his injuries.

• – 12 May 1933, Dautiêng: French overseer insults and beats a coolie who in turn stabs him to death.Footnote ¹³

Counter-violence and strikes were a last resort, when the coolies were denied the legal security promised by their contracts and the new labour laws. One particularly large-scale strike occurred on 16 December 1932 at Michelin's Dautiêng rubber plantation (Thudaumot). The strike began after the company, affected by the global economic crisis, reduced coolie salaries; 1,500 workers left the plantation to complain to labour inspectors. The workers were stopped by militias, who killed three workers and injured four others. Three years later, a similar walkout of 400 workers occurred. This was solved without violence, as the inspectors negotiated a compromise.Footnote ¹⁴

As Tran Tu Binh's (Reference Binh1985 [1965) account of the 1930 strike at the plantation of Phu Rieng illustrates, the coolies’ resilience and hope largely depended on activist individuals and worker solidarity vis-à-vis the colonial enterprises and their (European and indigenous) henchmen. Small communist cells became key actors in mobilising workers, while the maltreated bodies of coolies became “excellent elements of anti-French propaganda” (Monet Reference Monet1930: 25, translation by author; cf. Tully Reference Tully2011: 266). The workers’ resistance and unrest, as well as changing public opinion, gradually pushed the administration to redress the coolies’ plight (cf. Aso Reference Aso2018: 117–9, 158; Boucheret Reference Boucheret2008; Delamarre Reference Delamarre1931: 19–21).Footnote ¹⁵

The living conditions of coolie labourers included various elements of precariousness, including bad housing, unsanitary conditions, and insufficient nourishment. Food and clothing allowances were usually guaranteed by contract. However, the rice and dried fish provisions were often meagre and of poor quality. Binh (Reference Binh1985: 43) notes that progress was made when “the salted fish was not so often rotten” – although workers still had to buy additional rations in local shops. These shops were run by the companies (Binh Reference Binh1985: 27), Chinese contractors,Footnote ¹⁶ or the wives of the cai, the indigenous overseers (Monet Reference Monet1930: 27–28).

Plantation stores sold items such as needles for sewing clothes; they sometimes turned into gambling halls after payday. Many coolies bought supplies on store credit, gradually accumulating debts that forced them to sign consecutive contracts, which literally bonded them to the plantation (Boucheret Reference Boucheret2001; see Maurer Reference Maurer2010 for the case of Javanese plantation workers in New Caledonia). As in many plantation economies, debt was a crucial aspect of the unfreedom inherent in indentured labour (see Derks Reference Derks2010; Tappe Reference Tappe, Damir-Geilsdorf, Lindner, Müller, Tappe and Zeuske2016).

Corporal punishment or imprisonment could sometimes be avoided by paying penalties ranging from one to six days’ wages (Monet Reference Monet1930: 32). Such penalties added to a labourer's already existing financial burden, increasing the risk of indebtedness. The Vietnamese cai overseers also incurred such debts, a fact that partially explains their often relentless beatings of subordinate workers.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, the position of the cai was ambiguous: some were former coolies, embodying resilience and opportunity within precarity, while simultaneously contributing directly to the brutal conditions of the colonial plantation economy.

The wives of the cai constitute another example of social mobility, in their attempts to reduce precarity. Generally, female migrants were particularly vulnerable, as they were often subjected to sexual harassment, or given as sex slaves to loyal foremen (see Binh Reference Binh1985[Reference Binh1965]: 24; Vanmai Reference Vanmai1980: 100). If married to Vietnamese cai – whether involuntarily or tactically (cf. Bahadur Reference Bahadur2014) – women could secure a certain measure of protection, although they were often forced to do domestic labour for a small salary. In the 1930s, the French administration promoted female migration “to fix labour” (Bunout Reference Bunout1936: 35) in permanent villages. In 1929, the female-to-male ratio was only 1:5 in both Cambodia and New Caledonia (Delamarre Reference Delamarre1931: 36, 44).

To summarise the aspects of precarity among labour migrants brought to labour-intensive sites of colonial development – plantations, mines, and infrastructure construction – the everyday experience of labourers included structural and physical violence and exploitation, forced immobilisation, legal insecurity, malnourishment, poor sanitary conditions, and the risk of indebtedness. Resilience could emerge either as violent resistance and anti-colonial agitation, or in the shape of various micro-tactics, designed to make life more bearable, such as everyday acts of solidarity or tactical marriages for female migrants.

Filial piety and (often vain) hopes of a successful return to the home region – “cruel optimism” (see Berlant Reference Berlant2011) – underpinned resilience and perseverance. As Do (Reference Do2005: 20) has argued in her literary analysis of Jean Vanmai's novels: “In the difficult conditions of exile, filial devotion not only safeguards the morality of the migrant but also provides him or her with continuity and an invaluable sense of belonging”. Arguably, contemporary remittances, as well as an annual visit home for the Vietnamese Lunar New Year (Têt), have a similar function. Vietnamese labour migrants, both past and present, experience the ambiguities of a translocal lifeworld, between two worlds, as the following analysis of contemporary labour mobility illustrates.

Part II: Contemporary Vietnamese Labour Migration to Laos

Vietnamese transnational labour mobility today occurs in the context of global capitalism, with increasing regional economic integration (exemplified by FDI from various Asian countries). After đổi mới, the Vietnamese government created a market economy with a ‘socialist orientation’ and neoliberal tendencies, associated with new forms of (informal) labour relations and migration dynamics (Gainsborough Reference Gainsborough2010; Hann and Endres Reference Hann and Endres2018; Jandl Reference Jandl2013; Nguyen Reference Nguyen2015, Reference Nguyen2018). Market economy conditions engender new opportunities but also uncertainties and challenges (such as decreasing wages and worker protection) for the working population, as indicated above (Arnold Reference Arnold2012; Chang Reference Chang2009; Tran Reference Tran2013; Sasges Reference Sasges2013).

Workers in Vietnam face pressure from global capital and the socialist state. Some of them, like it or not, trade precarity at home for precarity abroad. For example, neighbouring Laos offers job opportunities in the booming construction and resource extraction sectors (Molland Reference Molland, Bouté and Pholsena2017). Transnational migration to Laos appears to be an extension of internal migration patterns in Vietnam. Lao-Vietnamese border regulations have been gradually relaxed in recent years, turning the shift from internal rural-urban migration within Vietnam to transnational migration to Laos into a relatively small jump. Decades of political and economic cooperation at the national level, as well as long-standing Lao-Vietnamese networks along the borderlands and across major Laotian cities, reduce barriers to cross-border movement (see Baird et al. Reference Baird, Noseworthy, Tuyen, Ha and Fox2018; Hanh Reference Hanh and Marston2014; Nguyen Reference Nguyen2008).

Vietnam-Laos migration thus differs from cross-border migration with China or Vietnamese contract labour in insular Southeast Asia and further abroad. A full comparative study, including all variants of Vietnamese labour mobility, would go beyond the scope of this article. However, a brief overview of present-day variants of indentured labour can help to contextualise the preceding observations on coolie precarity. In her informative study of Vietnamese contract labour in Malaysia, Lê Thu Huong (Reference Huong2010) describes aspects of precariousness under contract that reflect the colonial coolie experience described above. Female domestic workers, in particular, suffer from extreme dependency, violence, and insufficient legal protection.Footnote ¹⁸ On the other hand, some legal regulations and state control may reduce uncertainty; these contracts imply better opportunities for sending remittances to alleviate rural precarity at home.

Little Vietnamese labour migration to Laos is state-organised; it tends to be either spontaneous or related to pre-existing cross-border networks. Work migrants often follow in the footsteps of petty traders, soldiers, and political advisors who have moved to Laos in recent decades. Even in colonial times, Vietnamese labourers were recruited into labour-intensive sectors such as mining and construction. Given the chronic shortage of skilled labour in sparsely populated Laos – or, rather, the out-migration of skilled Lao labour to Thailand (Molland Reference Molland, Bouté and Pholsena2017) – today Vietnamese labour migrants are omnipresent in the country.Footnote ¹⁹

Many workers enter using border passes or one-month tourist visas and are technically not allowed to work. Work permits can be obtained from local authorities, however, for certain ‘fees’, as well as legally when local labour is insufficient (Baird Reference Baird2011; Baird et al. Reference Baird, Noseworthy, Tuyen, Ha and Fox2018; Molland Reference Molland, Bouté and Pholsena2017: 344). Vietnamese and Chinese investors in Laos prefer to hire Vietnamese and Chinese migrant workers, respectively. When work began on the new China-Laos railway in 2016, the provincial authorities of Oudomxay relaxed labour regulations and offered three-month work permits to improve migrant labour registration and management.Footnote ²⁰

Lao employers find it difficult to assemble adequate, skilled workforces. As one Laotian contractor explained, it is much more efficient to ask his Lao-Vietnamese middleman to recruit, say, twenty builders and ten carpenters for his construction site within a few days, than to look for the same number of skilled Laotian workers. The middlemen working as either recruiters (Lao: phu chat hang ngan) or foremen (Lao: hua na sang) were once migrant labourers; they have established a stable network of potential workers that spans their home regions in Vietnam. Speaking Lao fluently, and often holding permanent residency status, which allows them to work and run a business, such middlemen constitute an important nexus of Vietnam-Laos labour migration.

Such middlemen have helped to establish a system of labour recruitment marked by insufficient labour legislation and legal loopholes that provide migrants with a measure of wiggle room. Knowledgeable middlemen help to sort out legal issues between employers and the temporary workforce. However, legal insecurity and accident-prone jobs in the construction sector certainly produce precariousness. Long working hours and low pay make the jobs unattractive for many Lao, who often frame their reluctance by referring to the allegedly more skilled and industrious Vietnamese.Footnote ²¹

This attitude revives old colonial stereotypes of the indolent Lao and the diligent Vietnamese, a cliché that is still prevalent in Laos among Lao and Vietnamese alike. For this study, I interviewed two successful Laotian businessmen who run various construction projects in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. In response to a question about the prominence of Vietnamese labour in the Lao construction sector, they laughed out loud and explained that “we, the Lao do not like hard work and prefer partying and drinking” (Interview conducted in Vientiane in December 2016). They still insisted that this was true, even when I mentioned the thousands of Lao migrants who endure arduous work conditions in Thailand's garment industry.

There are many reasons why Vietnamese people accept difficult and precarious work conditions that many Lao seem to avoid. Rejecting the hard work, long hours, and low pay offered by the construction industry, many Lao prefer to work in the civil and service sectors. Moreover, a large part of the population still relies at least partially on agricultural work (time-consuming, depending on the season) for their household subsistence. Being far from home, the Vietnamese migrants lack the social obligations of local Lao. They are in the country simply to work as much as possible within a certain period of time before moving to the next job or returning home. Finally, as one Vietnamese worker in Vientiane explained, the exchange rate between the Lao Kip and the Vietnamese Dong makes even a lousy job in Laos more lucrative for Vietnamese than a comparable job in Vietnam, as long as the salary is paid in Lao currency.

Such aspects of Laos-Vietnam mobility are noted by Duong Bich Hanh (Reference Hanh and Marston2014) in her study of Vietnamese migration to Savannakhet in southern Laos, a region characterised by increasing economic and commercial activity, and improved infrastructure connectivity through convenient bus services to coastal cities in Central Vietnam. Hanh describes how some workers make the decision to move to Laos spontaneously, after a call from a Vietnamese acquaintance in Laos or a potential employer. Others jump from job to job within Laos for years, sometimes working off debts caused by the initial recruitment costs or various “fees” for work documents, deducted from already meagre salaries (Baird et al. Reference Baird, Noseworthy, Tuyen, Ha and Fox2018; Hanh Reference Hanh and Marston2014: 198–199; cf. Huijsmans and Phuxay Reference Huijsmans and Kabmanivanh2008).

In Vientiane's booming construction sector, the main tool of Vietnamese labour recruiters is the smartphone. Depending upon the skills required, a recruiter assembles work gangs of people that he has worked with before, who live in Laos or neighbouring ThailandFootnote ²²; they are often waiting for the recruiter's next call. This relationship is marked by mutual trust and dependency. The recruiter is responsible for organising visa extensions and other legal documents and must negotiate the lump-sum compensation offered by contractors for different kinds of work.

Either the Lao employer or the Vietnamese recruiter will register the band of workers with the local nai ban (head of the village or district) after obtaining temporary work permits from the police – for whom this widespread practice of “making law” (Endres Reference Endres2014: 611) provides a good income. Although a few deliberate repatriations of undocumented workers do occurFootnote ²³, they appear to be merely symbolic acts, designed to mask the deficiencies of Lao labour legislation and the country's continued reliance on and tolerance of semi-legal Vietnamese labour migration.

Thus, migration to Laos involves both opportunities and risks. Many of the informants who provided data for this study discussed precarity at home and the general difficulties of internal migration in Vietnam, including the residence system (cf. Arnold Reference Arnold2012). Labour mobility produces translocal lifeworlds, marked by temporary, serial employment and rare visits to families back in Vietnam, mainly for Têt New Year—when the bus companies increase their transport fees. According to Lao informants, Vietnamese workers often speak Lao (unlike most Chinese labour migrants); over the years, they have established networks within both the Vietnamese and Lao communities in Vientiane and other cities. The following migration history, provided by a man named Tuan, during an interview in Vientiane in December 2016, illustrates some exemplary aspects of Vietnamese labour mobility in Laos.

Tuan, who was 35 years old at the time, ran one of the numerous motorbike shops in Vientiane. There were many customers, who dropped by at all times of day and sometimes late at night, to have a flat tire fixed or a motorbike washed. Motorbikes are the main means of transport in Vientiane. Tuan shared the work with his Vietnamese wife, younger brother, and his brother's Lao wife, who, as a citizen, was the official owner of the business. The family literally lived on the shop floor – in a small separate bedroom at the back of the workshop. While Tuan and his brother did most of the repair work, the two women washed up to 50 bikes per day for 10,000 Kip each (US$ 1.20). The location of the shop, next to a busy road leading to the city centre, made it a profitable business.

Having experienced exhausting work and a lack of job security in a gravel pit in Quảng Bình (Central Vietnam), Tuan did not hesitate in 2002 when his uncle, who was running a busy bar close to a construction site in Savannakhet (southern Laos), invited him to help with his business. After his uncle's tragic death in a car accident, Tuan moved to Vientiane province to join a large Vietnamese workforce at a local sawmill. The Lao mill owner hired many Vietnamese workers, who were renowned throughout the country as skilled carpenters. Tuan crafted furniture and lived in a compound next to his workplace, as did most of the other labourers. He saved most of his salary, sending it back to his family in Vietnam.

In 2007, Tuan started work at a Vietnamese-run motorbike shop, where he acquired new skills as a mechanic and continued to save money, with which he finally started his own business three years later. His Lao language skills, acquired at his uncle's bar, helped him establish important connections in Vientiane with the Lao owner of the building space he wanted to rent, the district authorities, local traders, suppliers, and crucially the local police.

Tuan started his motorbike repair business with his younger brother, who had worked in Laos for a few years as a trader. Being a specialist in spare parts for cars and motorbikes, and having accumulated some financial capital, his brother was an ideal business partner. Their mutual trust was, of course, the key. In addition, his brother's Lao wife enabled the business to have a less precarious contract than many Vietnamese business owners are forced into. The brother's Lao wife signed the contract in her own name, while Tuan and their Lao landlord cultivated a friendly relationship. As Tuan's brother invested in high-quality tools and parts, the family business earned a good reputation in the neighbourhood for its quality services.

According to Tuan, local networks in his Lao neighbourhood are essential for running a smooth business. The owner of the building is a high-ranking government official, who receives 80,000 Thai Baht per year in rent (US$ 2,500). Although the contract is signed by Tuan's Lao sister-in-law, it is not permanent and must be renewed every year. Thus, despite running a successful business, the family status is precarious, since success depends on the good-will of the local phu nyai or “big man”, a concept reserved for powerful individuals with efficient patron-client networks (cf. Rehbein Reference Rehbein2007). The brothers are careful always to pay the monthly ‘fee’ to the district administration and the more informal ‘contribution’ to the ban; this totals 150,000 Kip. In addition, generous contributions to the local temple during Buddhist festivals strengthen the Vietnamese business owners’ relationship with the predominantly Buddhist Lao community.

To extend their temporary documents (Lao: nangsü), they do not have to join the ‘visa run’ that hundreds of Vietnamese migrants must make each month, across the Nongkhai border. Another ‘fee’ to the local administration and police every three months does the job. The two brothers return to Vietnam once a year to visit their parents and their elder brother's family in Quảng Bình. According to Tuan, the main reason for the infrequency of these visits is the cost of the travel, or, more specifically, the loss of income that results from leaving the business. Nevertheless, Tuan's brother generally uses his trips home to Vietnam to smuggle special spare parts that would cost several times more if bought in Thailand. Many supplies, ranging from tools and parts to paint and chemicals, must be imported or smuggled from Thailand, with hefty tariffs filling the pockets of customs officers.

To sum up, Tuan's life continues to be somewhat precarious; however, through regular services and various relationships, he has been able to create a measure of resilience. Like patron-client relationships, family networks play a significant role in alleviating precariousness. Tuan's story also reveals the everyday ‘law-making’ required to ‘legalise’ precarious businesses. The poorly implemented Lao law makes it difficult to distinguish between legal and illegal procedures in any case (for foreigners and Lao citizens alike). Trouble with the local authorities can jeopardise all accumulated social capital, according to other informants. A supposedly stable situation can become precarious if a nai ban or local policemen develops a grudge against a Vietnamese migrant.

One important aspect of Tuan's story is the seemingly minor reference to his previous job at the Vietnamese gravel pit. It is clear that translocal mobility within Vietnam is no less precarious than transnational migration to Laos or Thailand. Just like the colonial coolies, rural migrants compete for jobs in cities and labour-intensive industries (e.g. mines, plantations, and infrastructure). This competition – along with legal insecurity and other aspects of internal migrants’ precariousness in Vietnam (see Arnold Reference Arnold2012; Nguyen Reference Nguyen2018) – was mentioned by all interviewees in Laos, who also cited numbers: 90 million Vietnamese versus 7 million Laotians.

The shift from being a rural-urban migrant in Vietnam to becoming a transnational migrant in Laos appears to be a cunning move, especially in provinces such as Quảng Bình, which are much closer to Lao cities than to Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. There is no doubt that the precarious labour conditions for Vietnamese people in Laos, which involve legal insecurity and often difficult working conditions, manifest patterns of dependency. However, Vietnamese informants interviewed for this study argued that the environment in Laos was relatively friendly and convenient. As one shopkeeper in Houaphan said (Interview carried out in November 2016), Lao and upland Tai shopkeepers will smile and offer space next to their stalls, while Vietnamese competitors will draw their knives, sometimes literally, in marketplaces in Laos.Footnote ²⁴ Despite some indication of growing resentment among Vietnamese traders (who are sometimes considered deceitful and morally inferior), direct aggression is very rare – possibly due to the official pro-Vietnamese politics of the Lao government (cf. Baird et al. Reference Baird, Noseworthy, Tuyen, Ha and Fox2018).

Migrant resilience – or, rather, resistance – also includes unrest and spontaneous acts of violence against employers by workers who have been cheated. In Houaphan, Vietnamese workers took the car keys of a Lao contractor who tried to decrease salaries for construction work on a certain stretch of road linking Sam Neua to various remote areas – even sending Chinese thugs to intimidate the workers (Interview carried out in November 2016). As he was stuck in the middle of nowhere, the contractor agreed to restore the previous salaries. Later, he went bankrupt and the Vietnamese workers just disappeared. Eventually, they were contacted again by their middlemen to carry out some of the countless large and small construction projects in Laos.

The construction boom in Laos supports a flexible Vietnamese workforce of builders, carpenters, engineers, and other skilled workers, frequently accompanied by traders and entrepreneurs. Female migrants (sometimes married to male workers) often work in service sectors, including petty trade, beauty shops, and restaurants. As Tuan's case illustrates, Vietnamese family businesses have emerged in Lao cities, as a result of spontaneous migrations initiated by connections to the Vietnamese diaspora, the product of multiyear cycles of migration.Footnote ²⁵

At first glance, there seem to be differences between the old Vietnamese communities in urban Laos and more recent work migrants. Indeed, the ‘newcomers’ are sometimes considered rowdy, setting up mushrooming beauty parlours to compete with established Vietnamese entrepreneurs. However, there is a certain sense of solidarity between the two migrant communities (see Hanh Reference Hanh and Marston2014). When, several years ago, a fire destroyed a workers’ compound in Dong Palan, a commercial centre with many long-standing Vietnamese businesses – the ‘old’ Vietnamese community – donated money to support the newer Vietnamese labour migrants (Personal communication with Kathryn Sweet, November 2016).Footnote ²⁶

In addition to such precarity-reducing networks within Laos, translocal bonds to home villages play a more ambiguous role. Translocal life entails questions of belonging, emblematised by the Têt visits of migrant workers and their diffuse hopes of return. Social obligations compete with the economic significance of remittances. Vietnamese children born in Laos sometimes have only vague connections to their parents’ homeland; instead, they become part of an established Lao-Vietnamese community with its own associations, temples, and schools, which are held in high esteem by wealthy Lao families. Arguably, when Vietnamese migrant families finally settle in Laos, they enjoy a relatively privileged position, relative to Vietnamese families in Cambodia or Burmese families in Thailand, not to mention the ongoing precariousness of rural-urban migration in Vietnam.

Comparatively, coping with precarity in Laos appears to be easier than in other translocal networks. Key factors include mediocre law enforcement and good job opportunities for flexible workers. In comparison to Vietnam, Laos offers more space, less competition, and emerging economic niches. Although arbitrary laws engender latent uncertainty, Lao government policy tolerates Vietnamese migration in principle. In terms of vulnerability, knowledge, and mobility, today's Vietnamese labour migrants to Laos face far less precarity than the coolies once did, although various subtle patterns of everyday precariousness do persist.