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Vietnam Human Rights Network Supports Vietnamese Workers’ Rights
According to reliable sources, tens of thousands of workers in Saigon and neighboring provinces have been on strike through January, protesting unfair and abusive labor practices, and calling for decent minimum wages. Although the strikes were peaceful, the government has censured them as illegal as they were organized spontaneously without a governmental trade union’s sanction. About 100 workers have been arrested in Binh Duong Province. Facing this alarming violation of Vietnamese workers’ labor rights as stipulated in international legal standards, the Vietnam Human Rights Network has released the following statement:
Vietnam Human Rights Network 12522 Brookhurst St., Suite 23 * Garden Grove, CA 92840 - USA Tel: (714) 636-8895 Email: vnhrnet@vietnamhumanrights.net * http://www.vnhrnet.org * * * STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF VIETNAMESE WORKERS’ RIGHTS
Throughout its 70-year ruling over Vietnam, the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) has always boasted of being the vanguard for the worker and peasant proletarians and defenders of their interests. Yet, reality shows that its members, in power for over half a century in North Vietnam and more than 30 years in the whole nation, continually mistreat the workers and peasants who have suffered more injustice and become more destitute over the years.
During the resistance against the French, the VCP used to incite workers to go on strike, but now, ironically, not only are workers forbidden to strike, they are also persecuted by the VCP as it is now siding with foreign capitalists. This injustice has resulted in massive unrest. Since January of 2006, over 50,000 workers in the Saigon and Binh Duong areas have gone on strike to demand an increase in their low minimum pay rate that has remained unchanged since 1999: about US $40/month in foreign-shared firms and about US $20/month in state-owned companies. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese currency keeps losing value with inflation at 8 percent in 2005. Besides, horrible working conditions have always been a threat to the workers’ health and safety. To deal with recent protests, the VCP government has arrested about 100 workers in Binh Duong.
Such tragic events prove that the VCP has been lying and even cheating while it boasts to be protecting the interests of the poor, especially the workers and peasants. The truth is the masses have become poorer and poorer while the VCP leaders are getting richer and richer, wasting millions of dollars in a single sports game bet.
In response to this tragedy, the Vietnam Human Rights Network:
1. Demands that the VCP authorities immediately and unconditionally release those workers who were arrested for taking part in the strikes, and respect the workers’ human rights, particularly the rights to form independent labor unions and to go on strike, based on Article 23 of the International Declaration of Human Rights, Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and Article 8 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, promulgated by the United Nations and which the VCP government pledged to implement.
2. Urges the United Nations and countries that have provided aid to Vietnam as well as world labor organizations, especially the U.S. labor unions, to intervene and support the non-violent struggle of Vietnamese workers against exploitation and persecution by companies and by the VCP government.
3. Earnestly calls on Vietnamese compatriots in Vietnam and overseas to strongly support the Vietnamese workers in their fight against all social injustices.
Made in Little Saigon, California, 1-29-2006
Le Minh NguyenPresident
Vietnam Human Rights Network |