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CHAPTER 5 The Secret Labor Union in the Post-Unification Moment UNTIL 1983, the DRVN and its successor state, the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam (SRVN), celebrated 20 July as Labor Union Day, commemorating the unification of several labor organizations under the General Labor Confederation of Viet Nam on that day in 1946. In a directive of June 1983, however, the politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VNCP) decided, “in order to conform with the realities of the revolutionary history of the Vietnamese labor unions, . . . that the founding day of the Vietnamese Labor Union is July 28, 1929, when the Congress for the Foundation of the General Red Labor Union of Bac Ky [Tonkin] convened under the leadership of the Communist Party of Indochina.”1 Not surprisingly, given that it came from the VNCP politburo, this decision was adopted a few months later in 1983 by the Fifth All-Vietnamese Labor Union Congress. The General Red Labor Union of Tonkin was thus officially recognized as the ultimate precursor and the earliest organizational root for the present Viet Nam Federation of Trade Unions (VFTU),2 and since 1984, the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam has celebrated 28 July (1929) as the Founding Day of the Vietnamese Labor Union. Some five years after these changes, however, in August 1988, at the “Symposium on President Ton Duc Thang in Commemoration of the Centennial of His Birth” in Long Xuyen, An Giang, the politburo decision of 1983 came under strong criticism. Symposium participants were discussing the so-called “secret labor union” that Ton Duc Thang supposedly founded and led in the early 1920s in Sai Gon. To many of these symposium participants, the claim that this union was the first such organization in Viet Nam seemed undeniable, and its influence on the development of the Vietnamese working class appeared crucial . In consequence, they called for—indeed, demanded—not only a revision of the politburo ruling that had favored 28 July 1929, but also the official recognition that Ton’s much earlier founding of the secret 127 labor union constituted the real birth of Vietnamese unionism. The symposium, which was attended mostly by cadres who were engaged in the fields of cultural work, information, and propaganda, and by historians with VNCP affiliations, marked the argumentative and emotional climax of a historiographical debate that already had been smoldering for some years and that had, in fact, originated in the late 1950s in connection with Ton Duc Thang’s and Tran Van Giau’s first historical account of the strike at Ba Son. This chapter will trace the debate on Ton Duc Thang’s secret labor union over time, identify some of its issues, and discuss the arguments put forward. On the surface, the controversy centered on whether Ton’s organization could be considered to have been the country’s first union, what a correct historical assessment of its role in Vietnamese labor history should be, and whether such an evaluation warranted a change in the celebration of Labor Union Day. But my analysis intends to show further that, beyond these arguments, an undercurrent of quite different concerns and tensions existed that, however, either remained unaddressed or was hidden within the historiographical discourse. A closer reading of key texts of the debate on the secret labor union will show that, after the Revolution had achieved final military victory in 1975, regional identities played an ever more pronounced role in the construction of historical imaginations in Viet Nam. ACCOUNTS OF THE SECRET LABOR UNION Regardless of the side they took in the debate, Vietnamese historians and information cadres all readily acknowledged that Ton Duc Thang had been the person who singularly gave life and meaning to the labor union. Indeed, without a proper appreciation of Ton’s alleged activities prior to the union’s founding (and, to some extent, also of those after its dissolution), the controversy would have made no sense. By the time of the symposium, it was an established “fact” that Ton had worked as a mechanic during the 1910s and had gathered extensive experience of organized labor actions while working among the French proletariat in the arsenal of Toulon. His celebrated hoisting of the Red Flag in the Black Sea Mutiny was proof of his proletarian internationalism and advanced class consciousness. After his return to Sai Gon, possibly in late 1920, he therefore began organizing the secret labor union. 128 The Secret Labor Union in the Post-Uni...

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