 So, I warned John that my presentation or my talk is not really about enterprise development. So, you know, you might find that you're in the wrong session here, but I believe that the others fit in and I'll try to make a connection somehow. So, the work I'm presenting was done under one of your new Widers projects, the one on structural transformation and inclusive growth in Vietnam. Right. So, I realized my slides are somewhat packed, but that's because there are some photos and illustrations. So, if you get fed up and bored, you can just look at the photos instead. So, I want to start off by talking a little bit about the current context to sort of situate the paper within that. And so, this photo is from about half a year ago and it's one of many images of workers protesting. Here, it's the case of a Taiwanese footwear firm where workers were striking against the new salary system. So, a rise against changing employment relations. And last year, there were about 314 of these wildcat strikes. So, strikes that occur outside the legal framework. And that has been sort of, there's been waves of these strikes going on for the past 15 years or so. Yeah, basically, since 1995, there's been more or less 6,000 strikes of these wildcat strikes occurring. And I believe that's what is more than the most other than any other Asian economy. And it's also substantially more, I believe, than countries like South Africa that Lawrence will talk about later on. So, in 2011, was actually, if we look at this recent period, was the peak year for strikes. And we'll see in a minute the reasons for these kind of changes in workers' movements. So, the question is have these protests actually been successful in any way? And recent work by Mark Anna shows that in almost every case, at least one of the workers demands was fulfilled. And what we're seeing at the same time in Vietnam is that unionization is also on the rise, by contrast to most developed countries, of course. And so, the question is, is there a link here? And if so, what is the role of these enterprise-based unions, which is what the focus of this work is on? And are they actually, do they have a role to play in ensuring gains for workers? So, a lot of reasons cited in the literature for why we've seen this increasing number of strikes in Vietnam, but also, of course, in China, in Indonesia, and other countries. So, the reasons range from the sort of more broader theoretical ones like the capital-labor relationship, the economy is opening, that's leading to increase conflicts between labor and capital. Quite a few authors cite, in the case of Vietnam, the labor repressive styles of mostly local Asian investors, South Koreans or Taiwanese, as we saw before. Then you have these ideas of social backlash against the harsh working conditions, so that's kind of the more Polanyi type worker unrest, if you want. An example of that, actually, as I showed on the photo, which happened some years ago, in 2015, where close to 100,000 workers protested against a change or proposed change to social policy legislation. So, the Wildcat strikes are not just about employment relations and wages and so on, they're also sometimes at the level of government changes. I won't go into detail what happened, but maybe we can take that later on. Of course, the weak regulatory framework, as also was alluded to in the keynote speech this morning, and a lot of these emerging economies, you have very complex and sort of all-encompassing legal frameworks that don't really represent who they're supposed to cover. So that is, of course, also an incentive for workers to protest. The passive role of trade unions, I'll come back to that on the next slide, is often cited as the reason for these so-called collective bargaining by riots occurring outside the regulations. And then, of course, waves of high inflation, meaning that wages are under pressure, and that, of course, is a rational explanation for strikes. So just on that last point, we can see here that there's quite a neat pattern between inflation rates as illustrated by the grey line and the number of strikes. So that certainly is a factor in why we're seeing strikes, but basically there's a number of reasons cited. Okay. So where do these strikes mostly occur? It's mostly within foreign invested enterprises in industrial zones, so particularly the garment sector. That is the most strike-prone sector in Vietnam, an example being footwear industry. So this is a photo from a Nike factory where just about over 10 years ago, a lot of workers walked out in protest of low wages and footworking conditions. Strikes take place all over the country. There is some concentration in the south, though. And the majority of strikes take place in unionized firms. So, and just to give sort of that link back to the strikes, we know the union density varies across the different sectors. And in FIEs, where strikes are highest, it's around 60%, slightly lower in the private domestic sector. Union membership is increasing all the time, as I mentioned initially. And actually collective bargaining coverage is quite high in Vietnam on paper. In effect, it's a mere formality. It's actually just often the law that is kind of copied into the collective bargaining agreement without any consultation or proper sort of negotiations. And that is part of the issue. So what is so special about Vietnamese trade unions? I know we have some people in the audience from Vietnam, so you might want to comment or correct me on this later. But basically, because of economic transformation going on in Vietnam, this would present an opportunity for a growing private sector where you could have different kinds of, or new labor relations being established, negotiations on the base of interests. So a change from the old system. But the challenge is that the higher trade level union, which is the Vietnamese general confidant of labor, is the only recognized trade union. And all local grassroots enterprise-based unions have to be affiliated to this. So they're very limited in their kind of ability to represent their constituents. There's this top-down approach. So basically it's the higher level union that decides that now the enterprise should set up a union. And the leaders often are management or human resource workers. So again, very weak in terms of being able to represent those whose interests they should reflect. Strikes are legally permitted. So this is different in China. That doesn't mean that they're tolerated because politically they're not tolerated. But they're legal if authorized by the upper level union. That doesn't happen very often, which is why you get the wildcat strikes. And the reason, or the revised union law from 2013 also removed the right to strike over rights. So for example, unpaid overtime or occupational safety and health issues, you're allowed to strike over interests but not rights. So again, this leads to the question of how effective can enterprise-based unions actually be in representing workers' rights. Or workers' interests as it is. A lot of work, very difficult to summarize in one slide and even here two packs. So just to say some work has been done in South Africa, for example, on this. And they see, yes, there is a union wage gap, which is what most of the literature shows. But some variation along the wage distribution depending on where you are. In the case of Vietnam, most of the existing work is very in-depth qualitative case study based. And then linking to the strike incidents, there is some work that it seems to indicate that when workers are actually speaking to unions, asking them to represent them, it has, even if the unions are kind of incapable of doing much on their own, you could say they somehow are able to push for workers to have higher wages. So there's something evidence that, yes, it may be possible for unions to act in workers' interests. But like I said, most of the work that's already there is qualitative or it is econometrically limited in terms of being able to account for worker hatred and heterogeneity and so on. So this study, which is part of this union wider project, uses or makes use of the Vietnamese SME survey that's been going on for, well, since 2002, I believe, or five, with the last year being 2015. So it's a large survey of small and medium enterprises. And for some of the years, there was also a survey done of the workers or a sub-sample of workers in the firms. So it's manufacturing firms from different sectors and different legal categories. And in this study, it's then based on matching the firms to the workers. So around 1600 full-time workers are part of the sample and more or less evenly distributed between the two years. So basically, I'm looking at 300 roughly firms with the sample workers. It's possible to link the workers over time so as to have a balance panel of firms, which then is slightly less, of course, than the total sample. Yeah. So SMEs, as we saw before, are not generally firms that are prone to having strikes. And when you look at the data, there's nothing on strikes, although it's part of the questions in the survey. So this is not a factor in the analysis, but the idea is to see whether these indications of the fact that unions may play a role actually also transfers to SMEs or is it only a case for the larger foreign-invested firms? I'm not sure time-wise. Okay. Right. So in terms of a little bit about what the data says, union density is very much in line with the national figures. So that's quite nice, 30-something percent, increasing quite a bit over time. And then when you restrict the sample to only looking at firms that have unions, we see that union membership rate is about 80%. So it's voluntary to be part of a union. And the fact that you have workers within firms that are not union members actually means that it's possible to go a little bit more in-depth with the analysis. I'll come back to that. Collective bargaining is relatively high again. And this is obviously within firms that are unionized. Again, the figure is more or less the same as the national level. But bear in mind, it doesn't really mean anything. Often it's ink on paper, you would say. So I make use of the fact that there's a lot of information and variables in the survey that are available when you want to do an analysis of what determines wages, right? So I'm looking at union membership and does it mean anything in relation to wages? So obviously, gender, hiring methods, your job function, these are all factors that also affect whether you become a union member or and whether you have wages of a certain level. So important to include. One thing that's quite nice for the analysis is that the survey asks about what are the benefits of being member of union? And here we see that it's actually having higher wages or stable, better and more stable wages. Yeah, it's 13% that say that's sort of a benefit of being a union, but it's not the main factor. So it doesn't seem that workers are selecting into unions to have higher wages. Social benefits, yes. And previous work showed that yes, being a union member, controlling for all other factors is substantially correlated with having better provision of social benefits. But the fact that wages is not a major factor is kind of comforting. So the only equation here is just to show the model in estimating the union wage gap. And that's basically the individual wage outcome, depending on worker characteristics, which are all specified above, firm characteristics. And then of course, whether you're a union member or not, right? So that is a kind of standard model of determining whether there's a wage premium. Won't go into the methods, but basically just to say that I try to use all kinds of techniques to say that this is the pure effect of union membership, and it's not capturing something else. So basically, matching to compare workers that became union members to those that didn't over the time period, and so on, and also instrumental variable technique. So what results show is that, yeah, there's a union wage gap, it ranges from about 10 to 20%, depending on what specification it is and what approach is taken of the ones I showed on the previous slide. When doing quantile regressions, it is revealed that actually the wage premium increases as you go up the wage distribution. So that is similar to some studies by, for example, David Card and Rika. But they differ, for instance, from studies in South Africa and Ghana where you find it's the opposite. It's more of a flattening effect, right? So that it's higher for the lower end of the wage distribution. When just restricting the sample to firms that are unionized and making the fact of the use that there are workers that are not members of the firm level union, the union wage gate is 10%. So that's in line with the overall or with the general results. And what it shows is that being a union member is a direct effect. It's not a spillover effect, right? Because then otherwise all workers, there wouldn't be a gap. All workers would have a benefit from being a union member. And I think that's, yeah, not really surprising, given that the collective bargaining agreements and methods are quite weak, right? So if they were stronger, you would probably see more of a spillover within the firm. And also some further checks to see if there's any sort of repercussions or knock-on effects on the informal sector shows that there's not. So to some extent labor market segmentation. So being located in an area where there's a certain concentration of unions and if you're not in a unionized or you're in an informal sector, it doesn't mean that your wage will be boosted. So just to sum up, it does pay off to be a union member in a firm with unions. But the effect is stronger for the more skilled workers, right? So what are the implications? Yes, it seems that there is a widening of the skills gap going on to some extent. And one of the main ways to counter that obviously is to make the collective bargaining agreements more based on negotiations and real discussions and not just being transferred directly from what's written on the law. So in fact, the revised labor code, so it's not so new anymore, did extend the right of collective bargaining to be sort of rolled out to non-union workers. But as also discussed this morning in the opening session, it doesn't really mean anything if it's not enforced in practice, right? It's just the legal framework. There's been quite a bit of progress actually in terms of sectoral level bargaining, especially in garments, also in rubber and other sectors are coming up. And increasing pressure actually on the VGCL has also meant that in recent years they've started looking into more the quality of the collective bargaining agreements and basically doing some evaluations of how they can be more reflecting proper negotiations and not just sort of copied from the legal framework. But I think still the estimates are that 56% of bargaining agreements are actually just pure copies without any extra additions from workers' demands. I have zero minutes left. So just to finalize and to say okay, where are we going from here? You all know that the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement of course doesn't exist anymore, but its follower, which I'm not going to spell out, of course might present an opportunity along with the Vietnam-EU free trade area, which is I think taking effect or should take effect next year, there are extensive labor rights commitments made from Vietnam. So the question is will this push even more for reform of the union system and revisions to the labor court in terms of freedom of association and collective bargaining and so on. So that remains to be seen. Next year they're presenting the new draft labor law to the National Assembly and again it remains to be seen whether some of these sort of initiatives towards improving the labor relations situations will be part of that. Yeah, end of story. Maybe just, okay, so just until we have the next presenter I can just, I found this good to be funny, but this is to link to the free trade area, I mean the free trade agreements coming up. Yeah, but basically you could maybe, I mean there's no Vietnamese worker, but I mean you can imagine that, yeah. So just to say that it should have positive implications, but we also know what free trade agreements may do. Thank you.