Reserve army of Ho Chi Minh City: migrant workers in the Ho Chi Minh City's industrial parks and processing export zones under the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT COVID-19 appeared in Vietnam in January 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) officially announced the Covid-19 pandemic caused by the new strain of Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) around the globe on 1-3-2020. From 1-4-2020, Vietnam introduced social distancing to prevent the spread of the disease in society, affecting every social class, including ‘internal' migrant workers who were often formerly farmers. This paper reports on research evaluating the impact of the pandemic on the internal migrant ‘reserve army of labour' now working in industrial parks (IPs) and export processing zones (EPZs) in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Internal migrant workers make up the majority of employees, at 70% to 85.5% and this article offers a chance to evaluate Marxist categories of work, along with the point of view of the systems and social network approaches, to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic impacts production activities at IPs & EPZs. The paper asks how management of workplaces in the face of the pandemic imposed coping strategies affecting levels of employment and lives of migrant workers at EPZs and IPs. Looking especially at migrant workers' strategies in facing the challenges of the pandemic, the use of Marx’s “floating, latent and stagnant” categories of the “reserve army of labour” is reconsidered on the basis of information from available statistical data and from detailed interviews and observations in the Project “Improving the effectiveness of dialogue and collective bargaining in private enterprise and foreign directed investment enterprises in HCMC” under a grant from the Ho Chi Minh City Science and Technology Development Fund, 2020-22 - HCMFOSTED.