Market Reforms and Women Workers in Vietnam A Case Study of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City

Ongoing research on market reforms and their implications for labour reveal that the labour-shedding aspect of industrial restructuring or of privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) affects women workers more seriously than male workers. There are two reasons for this outcome. One is linked to cultural constructions of gender, whereby almost universally, women are still associated with family responsibilities first and the labour force only secondarily. The second reason is linked to economic calculations, typically made during periods of recession or restructuring, which affect women workers who require extra costs such as maternity leave, sick leave, childcare allowances, transportation, and so on. Thus the higher unemployment rates of women in nearly all transition economies and in other countries where privatization or structural adjustment leads to labour-force reductions. (See, for example, Fong and Paull 1993; Moghadam 1994; Standing 1994). The literature has also found a decline in labour standards during and after economic restructuring, which seems to result from efforts to cut labour and production costs, increase profitability, and attract foreign and domestic private investment. Indeed, throughout the world, the contraction of the state sector, the promotion of the private sector, growth of the informal sector, increases in unemployment, and a decline in the social power of unions provide the context in which labour standards are under attack while various forms of "precarious employment" are increasing: selfemployment, employment through sub-contracting arrangements, part-time work, temporary work, household production, child labour, and so on, including the growing use of relatively cheap female labour in the private sector. Standing (1989) has aptly termed this trend "global feminization through flexible labour". Many studies by women-indevelopment specialists have drawn attention to the gender-specific effects of various forms of economic restructuring, such as shifts in women's productive activities, their increased responsibility for domestic responsibilities when social services decline, and changes in their household status. (See, e.g., Davin 1991; Elson 1992; Beneria 1992; Moghadam 1993.)