C H A P T E R O N E

LAW AND PRECARIT Y IN DAILY LIFE

Lan and her husband, Quang, the middle-aged couple whose vignette
appears at the beginning of this book, moved from their rural home-
town province in the north to work in Hồ Chí Minh city (HCMC)
in the 1990s. Lan has been working as a line worker in the garment
industry, while Quang used to work in the construction industry, both
having experienced short periods of casual and unstable employment.
Compared with other migrant couples that I met during my field trips,
Lan and Quang both had children relatively late: They were in their
mid-forties and early fifties, and their two children were only around
one and three years old. Lan said that she would be unable to pay for
her children’s schooling in the future if the family continued to stay in
the city. The couple did not have much in terms of savings of their own
for the past twenty years of work: After paying for all essential house-
hold expenditures, they usually remitted any extra money to help their
family members back in the hometown province. They commented on
their working conditions with a sense of bitterness and dissatisfaction:
Despite the hard work, their wages are “low” or at times “not enough,”
and they usually face a lot of pressure and coercion from their manag-
ers and supervisors over fulfilling their assigned tasks. When talking
about their future plans to move back to their rural hometown to save
on the cost of living, the couple looked apprehensive. Lan said, “now
that some garment companies have been established in my home-
town, I could probably apply for work there.” But both the couple and
myself know that the chance of middle-aged workers getting a man-
ual, assembly job is much lower compared to younger workers, due to

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   L aw and Precarity in Daily Life

assumptions in the labor market about their decreased physical capa-

bility and productivity. And even if Lan could ultimately get one, she
may just end up in another tense working environment and subsisting
on a low-paid job.
During our conversations, I let Lan and Quang freely share with
me about their working and living conditions before explicitly asking
questions about the law. When asked if they had the opportunity to get
frequently informed and updated about changes to the labor law and
their rights and benefits at work, they were quite passive-­aggressive:
“we are not interested,” and then complained about the lack of sup-
port from the state and unions in relation to their poor working and
living conditions – a far cry from their expectations. After all, similarly
to many scholars who study law in commonplace settings, I gain the
most important insights and understandings about law through letting
participants lead the conversations and listening to their own words.
I also felt and shared with them their anger, distress, anxiety, dashed
hopes, and a general sense of uncertainty about the future. These feel-
ings and sentiments made their survival strategies on a daily basis real,
and entangled within the broader social, political, and legal structures.
The kind of passive-aggressive attitude that I encountered is not
uncommon among interviewed workers and residents as they responded
to my explicit question about the law. To most of them, judging from
their working and living experiences, a fair treatment under the law is
usually granted either by money, social and political status, or personal
connections. My explicit reference to the law was usually followed by
interviewees’ disinterest or diversion from it. Yet, at the same time,
such a passive-aggressive attitude should not be read only as the indi-
viduals’ indifference (or even distrust) toward the law. When these
people described their conditions and recalled the conversations that
they had with their neighbors, family, friends, coworkers, employers,
state authorities, or brokers and intermediaries who operate in the gray
area of the law, they also evoked languages, rights, and entitlements
derived from the law, or appropriated parts of the official discourse of
law and policy propagated by the state and media. Lan and her husband
were not interested in getting informed about any change to labor law
and policy at their workplaces, but they frequently made use of the
expression “rights and interests” when describing their satisfaction or
dissatisfaction with issues at work. As I have shown in my previous
study, the expression “rights and interests” is a commonplace reference
of Vietnamese workers to their rights encoded in the labor law, and

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 L aw and Precarity in Daily Life

has appeared widely in workers’ projections of their expectations of the

legal and moral obligations from the state and unions (Nguyen, 2019).
The couple gave their opinions about the government’s minimum wage
adjustment and the wage policies at their workplaces, as well as the
planned legal amendment to raise the retirement age of Vietnamese
employees. And despite her claim of not being “interested” in the law,
Lan has had many conversations with her manager and office staff in
her company in relation to her social insurance benefits and her inten-
tion to withdraw her pension early. She was fully aware of the benefits
of accumulating social insurance for a required amount of time to be
eligible for pension benefits. Had she not been in need of a large sum
of money in the near future, Lan told me that she would have chosen
to continue working and paying into the social insurance fund for the
next ten years, an option that, according to the media and official dis-
course propagated by the state and union officials, is more “sensible” as
it provides employees with long-term welfare and security.
Regardless of their different living and working conditions, workers
and residents interviewed for this study belong to an economically disad-
vantaged group within Vietnamese society. Those who are still working,
either in stable or unstable jobs, earn a relatively low income, meaning
that they have limited savings and are likely to struggle financially when
any extra household spending needs arise. They live in poorly maintained
accommodations, either rented or their own. The most elderly group
includes former factory workers who have retired after serving for more
than twenty years. Most of them are living on a monthly pension but they
also have to supplement their living through petty, casual work. In finding
options to solve their everyday problems, these people resort to measures
that are both available and constrained because of their social, economic,
and political disadvantages. Whether their objective is to have enough
money to feed themselves and their family, to claim retirement benefits
after decades-long service at work, or to have better control over their life,
there are ways in which law can be mobilized, exploited, or contravened,
in order to fulfil these objectives.

1.1  H E GEMON Y, A LI E NAT ION, A ND EM P OW E R M E N T:

T H R EE AC C OU N T S OF L AW I N E V E RY DAY LI F E
How does law matter to the everyday survival strategies of these
Vietnamese citizens who live and work in uncertain and sometimes des-
perate conditions? Is law able to empower those who choose to invoke

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 1.1  Hegem o ny, A lienatio n , and Em p owerment

it, or would invoking law only lead to failure and disappointment?

These questions, on bringing law to bear on everyday problems, build
upon the longstanding sociolegal inquiry of legal consciousness. This
inquiry takes interest in the meaning and operation of law in everyday
life: How law structures and influences social thoughts, behaviors, and
relationships, and how society in turn determines and constitutes the
meaning of law. Regardless of their different methodological and the-
oretical assumptions about the law, most scholars have agreed that law
is not the only springboard for social thoughts and behavior; instead,
law always competes or interacts with other sets of moral worldviews,
or widely held beliefs and practices beyond the scope of law. If we con-
sider legal consciousness as the way in which people perceive of and act
according to the law, then various manifestations of legal conscious-
ness can be discerned whereby law matters to a greater or lesser degree,
or not at all, in the constitution of views, judgments, decision-making,
and practices encountered on a day-to-day basis (Albiston, 2005; Hull,
2003; Nielsen, 2000; Young, 2020).
Conventional legal consciousness studies have been concerned with
questions about law’s hegemonic and pervasive role within society:
How law is able to elicit popular consent and subscription to its ideals
and values despite its many shortcomings and the gap between what law
promises and what it actually delivers. By analyzing people’s attitudes
and perceptions toward the law through the way they talk about and
engage in mundane activities in informal settings (Ewick and Silbey,
1992), these studies consider law as a single but powerful set of ideas
and cultural schemas that shapes the way ordinary people make sense
of the world around them and seek resolutions to their social problems.
Most legal consciousness studies in this hegemony strand situate law
within the nexus of power relationships at a societal level and investi-
gate how individuals’ actions represent conformity to and/or resistance
against the existing rules and power arrangements to which they are
subjected (Ewick and Silbey, 2003; Sarat, 1990). Patricia Ewick and
Susan Silbey’s eminent typologies of “before the law,” “with the law,”
and “against the law” (Ewick and Silbey, 1998) capture the varying
ways in which people view and approach the law in their lives: They
either defer to law’s authority, use law as a game, or try to resist it.
Though people are at times engaged in individual subversive tactics
that question the moral grounds of law and challenge the power that
they are entrapped within, these tactics only prove or consolidate law’s
pervasive presence and authority (see Chua and Engel, 2019).

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 L aw and Precarity in Daily Life

The hegemony account of law has faced several theoretical and

empirical challenges. One of these challenges is its emphasis on the
power relationships that underpin the operation of law and the ine-
quality that law creates or serves to sustain in society. This emphasis
results in the scholarship overlooking the social structures and pro-
cesses that constitute the functioning of the legal system (Liu, 2015).
Since the hegemony account of law originates from the law and society
movement in the USA, where people have been habituated to the
language of rights, it may be limited in explaining legal phenomena in
other contexts (Hertogh, 2018). While the notion of legal conscious-
ness, which is most famously associated with the hegemony account of
law, has been applied to studies of sociolegal issues outside the USA,
including in authoritarian regimes, it has to be studied alongside other
social and cultural frameworks to capture the unique and distinctive
way in which law operates in these settings.
The second strand of legal consciousness studies demonstrates
law’s limited, if any, role and influence in daily life. Law is absent and
detached from the way people talk, behave, and what they do about
their social problems. People tend to turn away from law or rely on
informal processes and practices that challenge and undermine law’s
authority (He, 2005; Hendley, 2011b; Kurkchiyan, 2003; Su, 2018).
Perhaps one of the most prominent critiques to the thesis of law’s
hegemony can be found in Marc Hertogh’s (2018) “legal alienation”
concept, which challenges the assumption about the pervasiveness and
legitimacy of law in any society. Legal alienation, defined as the gap
between legalistic ideals and popular, socially grounded understand-
ings of justice, is a significant challenge to the justice system – one
that is already prone to social contention (Hertogh, 2018). The mis-
match between law’s ideals and its practices ultimately turns people
away from the law. Other studies of law and society conducted in tran-
sitional regimes, where legal reform has been instrumental in these
countries’ economic opening and development of a market economy,
have focused on the persistence of longstanding informal norms, widely
held beliefs and practices beyond the scope of the law. These informal
norms and practices continue to defy legal rules transplanted from uni-
versal ideals and principles in the regulation of social behaviors and
relationships (He, Wang, and Su, 2013; Hendley, 2011a; Liu, 2018).
This second strand of legal consciousness scholarship moves away
from the power-centric approach found in the hegemony school
and focuses on the social and cultural factors that account for law’s

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 1.1  Hegem o ny, A lienatio n , and Em p owerment

legitimacy, or lack thereof. These factors also explain continuities and

changes in the legal processes and practices during periods of legal
reform where newly instituted laws coexist and constantly compete
with preexisting practices and rules. In these studies, the individual
rights holders or targets of the laws are usually portrayed as rational
actors who choose to use, invoke, or resist the law because such an act
would serve their best interests. This approach, however, overlooks the
normative reasoning that underpins individual behaviors and attitudes
toward the law, as well as the opportunities and constraints that law
offers or creates in people’s pursuit of their interests.
The third account of legal consciousness acknowledges the poten-
tial benefits of law achieved through awareness-raising and rights
mobilization. This strand of literature highlights the agency of vul-
nerable, marginalized and disadvantaged people to deploy legal rights
and tactics to remedy unfair and negative experiences (Abrego, 2011;
Gallagher, 2006; Hernández, 2010; Nguyen, 2017a, 2019). As these
people become aware of and interpret wrongdoings and unfairness
through a legal lens, for instance, following and thanks to their par-
ticipation in legal aid and legal education programs offered in their
community, they could break their silence and pursue their rights and
entitlements. Of course, people’s engagement with the legal system
can result in disappointment and disenchantment when it fails to
deliver the outcomes that they desire (Gallagher, 2006). Even so, the
potential benefits of invoking the law are not to be discounted, and
law and discourse of rights can contribute, in a direct or subtle way, to
progressing the broader process of meaningful social changes.
As mentioned briefly in the “Introduction,” the experiences of my
research participants in Vietnam do not fit within any of these previ-
ous accounts. While the third strand of legal consciousness studies, in
examining the potential benefits of individuals’ engagement with the
law, offers an approach that is the most similar to the one taken in this
book, most of these studies have investigated the formal settings in
which law operates (for example, the legal aid bodies or organizations
and the courtrooms), rather than everyday life where the power of law
could be most salient. In outlining the situations of my research partic-
ipants, I have highlighted a paradox of their legal decision and behav-
ior: How did these people invoke the law or resist it only to end up in a
further disadvantaged condition? This paradox highlights the way and
extent to which these individuals’ invocation of the law actually works
against, rather than in favor of, their interests, and defies any prior

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 L aw and Precarity in Daily Life

assumption about the rationality of their decision-making. To fully

explain this paradox we need to attend to the factors and processes
that enable people to act upon the law, but at the same time operate so
powerfully in opposition to the benefits of invoking the law as a means
to achieve greater economic and social stability.
My response to this puzzle is formulated and developed from ethno-
graphic, intensive field research that involved seventy research partici-
pants who exhibited various and distinctive perceptions and behaviors
toward the law, as well as their actual experiences with the law on
a daily basis. This book presents the first attempt to study whether
and how law matters to the survival strategies of ordinary citizens in
Vietnam. It offers important insights into everyday legality in Vietnam
and contributes to the relevant emerging sociolegal scholarship which
has thus far focused on the formal and regulatory aspects of the legal
system. This book also contributes to the scholarship on legal con-
sciousness by introducing the notion of precarity and conceptualizing
its relationship to the law. A deep immersion in the lives and commu-
nities of research participants has illuminated in a significant way how
people’s precarity shapes and is shaped by their attitudes and behavior
toward the law. Their precarity and experiences of the law are not only
about material deprivation, suffering, and desperation, but are also
about resourcefulness, resilience, and adaptability.

1.2   PR E CA R I T Y AS DA I LY S T RUG GLE

The stories to be captured in this book, told by low-income workers,
retirees, and residents like the female breadwinner Lan, are stories
about precarity. In this book I use the term precarity broadly to capture
the vulnerable nature of life, whereby individuals in any society can
be subject or exposed to various forms of material deprivation, harms,
wrongs, injuries, and injustices. Precarity usually entails experiences
and feelings of insecurity and uncertainty about the future, mostly
derived from an individual’s living and working arrangements, and
the power relationships to which they are subjected in these arrange-
ments. The notion of precarity also acknowledges individual will and
capability to mitigate and overcome adverse and challenging condi-
tions, and to achieve more stability in life. Because of its analytical
nuances and richness, precarity offers a better and more appropriate
concept to describe people’s experiences than some other terms that
convey similar meaning but are indeed narrower, such as uncertainty

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 1. 2  Precarity a s Daily Struggle

or vulnerability. These other terms are either too generic or have been
used to describe some static condition, and thus are unable to capture
the dynamic and various aspects of individual struggles on a daily basis,
which are grounded within their interactions and negotiations with
broader social relationships and institutional processes.
As a starting point, my analysis of precarity is inspired by the rich
body of literature on the disruptive impacts of global technological
change and industrial reform on the nature of work and welfare. This
research agenda examines the structural conditions that give rise
to forms of precarious employment, characterized by “uncertainty,
low income, and limited social benefits and statutory entitlements”
(Vosko, 2010: 2). The condition of precarity is not exclusive to work
and income-generating activities in the informal economy, but is also
prevalent across the traditional, formal sectors whereby casual and
fixed-term contracts are increasingly offered in place of secure, long-
term employment (Cruz-Del Rosario and Rigg, 2019; Kalleberg and
Hewison, 2013; Lee, 2019; Standing, 2011; Vosko, 2010). These forms
of precarious employment have been on the rise as businesses attempt
to cut costs and rely on flexible labor arrangements to be able to sur-
vive in a situation of intensified market competition. These strategies
of making work more flexible and unstable in turn result in the frag-
mentation of the working people’s interests and solidarity, thus dimin-
ishing the potential and capacity for meaningful collective action that
is capable of reversing the tide of precarization (Alberti et al., 2018;
Neilson and Rossiter, 2005; Porta et al., 2015).
These disruptive impacts of capitalist development upon the lives
of working people are further exacerbated by the retreat of the state in
the provision of social welfare. Even though precarity is a shared exis-
tential condition, it is experienced differently along the lines of social
class and positioning, which in essence means that certain socioeco-
nomic groups and individuals within these groups suffer more precar-
ious and insecure lives than others (Butler, 2009: ii). The existential
nature of the precariousness of life raises important questions about
the ethics of protection and security provided through political and
legal institutions, which have become increasingly subject to market
forces. Governance in the neoliberal area has shifted redistributive jus-
tice from an egalitarian model to a more individualized, market-based
model of risk management, which contributes further to destabilizing
livelihoods (Bourdieu, 1998; Masquelier, 2019; Parry, 2018). As such,
precarity is no longer an exception but a normalized condition of life

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 L aw and Precarity in Daily Life

that results from and is intrinsic to the broader governmental pro-

cess (Lorey, 2015: 13). Precarity may give rise to empowerment and
resistance as the governed subjects seek to overcome their condition,
but such an act of resisting would more often entrench certain forms
of subordination that have been sustained through the hierarchy of
power and structural inequality.
The state of precarity in Vietnam resonates with the broader global
trend while also carrying its own distinctive features of a transitional,
socialist-oriented market economy. The hallmark reform of đổi mới
(renovation) has transformed Vietnam from a centrally planned econ-
omy to a market economic system. The country, under the only rule
of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), has welcomed the devel-
opment of private capital to operate alongside the gradually shrinking
state sector that used to dominate the pre-reform era. Economic decen-
tralization has turned Vietnam from being one of the poorest countries
of the world into a lower middle-income economy. The structural shift
from the low-productivity agricultural sector into industry and service
has turned the country into one of the manufacturing hubs of global
products, driven mainly by the flow of foreign direct investment (FDI).
Labor-intensive, light manufacturing industries that mostly produce
for exports have created thousands of jobs in fast-paced industrial areas
and contributed to the rapid growth of urbanization and upward social
mobility (Lim, 2011; Tran and Norlund, 2015). Over thirty years, the
poverty rate has fallen from 70 percent to less than 6 percent of the
population, and the country’s GDP growth rate has remained at around
5–8 percent every year (World Bank, n.d.(b)).
While the reform has, overall, lifted the quality of life of most
Vietnamese citizens, at the same time it has entangled them within
new forms of social and economic relationships that have signifi-
cant ramifications in the way people lead and sustain their lives. In
the planned economy, essential services such as education, health,
and social insurance were provided by the state, which promised full
employment and economic security to its people (London, 2014: 89).
The transition to a market economy has witnessed the restructuring of
state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the institutionalization of the growth
of private domestic and FDI sectors, and the marketization of public ser-
vices such as health care and education (Gainsborough, 2009; London,
2014; Painter, 2008). The subtle but fundamental shift toward a neo-
liberal model of governance has meant that various aspects of people’s
lives are increasingly subject to market forces and private regulation.

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 1. 2  Precarity a s Daily Struggle

Essential services such as education and health have been commod-

ified, which places greater burden on households and individuals to
pay for them (London, 2014: 95). Even though the Vietnamese state
has combined both market and redistributive logics in the provision
of essential services, the shift to privatization has further marginal-
ized low-income individuals and households in accessing them and in
turn perpetuated social inequality (Taylor, 2004). The penetration of
market forces additionally manifests itself through the circulation of
ideologies, discourses, and practices, such as “market economic and
free trade discourses … as a means to achieve a higher quality of life,”
“privatization and self-regulation,” and “the moralization of logics of
efficiency, quality, and accountability as models for correct, modern, or
civilized personhood” (Schwenkel and Leshkowich, 2012: 382). These
features, amid the continuing prevalence of traditional ways of life and
practices that center upon collectivism and communitarianism, char-
acterize post-reform Vietnam as a transforming society full of progress
and openness, but also contradictions and ambiguities.
More than half of the low-income workers and residents featured in this
study are those who have taken advantage of new income opportunities
and social mobility arising from the country’s reform, while others have
been disadvantaged or marginalized in a market economy. Many young
people from rural areas, mostly in their late teens, have left their home-
towns to move to the industrialized provinces and cities to seek a better
life out of poverty, but are now toiling under strict discipline and quotas in
factories that reward them just enough to survive. The precarity of rural–
urban workers of their generation, as we will see in Chapter 3, can be
pinned down to their ongoing daily struggles to make ends meet, and the
sense of uncertainty and instability when any pressing family expenditure
arises. For many years, despite the government’s annual minimum wage
adjustment since 2007, many low-skilled factory workers in Vietnam have
yet to enjoy a living wage without working overtime, sometimes exces-
sively (Nguyen, 2019). They and their family, like Lan’s, usually stay in
small, poorly maintained, and poorly ventilated units for rent, and have
to be extremely careful in their spending. Many of them have to save
money to help their family members back in their rural hometowns. In
terms of their employment stability, even when employees in principle
have their workplace rights and benefits protected by the law, these rights
are routinely violated or evaded as part of businesses’ strategies to keep
their costs down to thrive in a competitive market environment (Arnold,
2013; Buckley, 2022).

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 L aw and Precarity in Daily Life

The precarity experienced by the retired workers who used to work in

an SOE, to be covered in Chapter 4, is more concerned with a declin-
ing sense of economic security and the perceived feeling of workplace
injustice. The enterprise where they worked was one of thousands of
SOEs being privatized, or in the Vietnamese terminology, equitized, in
the first few decades of đổi mới (Gainsborough, 2009). While employ-
ment in the state sector used to be considered a privilege, with guar-
anteed economic security and insurance benefits, the reform agenda
of SOE restructuring has resulted in the redundancy of thousands of
state employees. The retired state workers interviewed for this study
managed to keep their jobs, but they reported that their wages had
been frozen and the workload increased in the years following the com-
pany’s equitization. This change pushed workers into financial difficul-
ties and created a sense of abandonment among senior workers who
had contributed several decades of service to the company. Finally,
in Chapter 5, we will learn about experiences of instability due to a
lack of housing available to low-income residents in a peri-urban area
of HCMC. Thanks to massive FDI and industrial development, many
people have moved from less developed or rural provinces and areas to
the city to seek a better life. Once living in cheap and poorly main-
tained units for rent, many migrants are among thousands of the urban
poor who lack access to quality housing and are left out of expansive
property development and the ever-growing real estate market. As
renting does not offer a long-term solution to their family’s housing
needs, these migrants and residents tried to have their own house built
on a very low budget, only to find themselves significantly disadvan-
taged in a two-tiered land market and a housing regime that is fraught
with patronage and corruption.
Besides the general lack of stability in employment, economic condi-
tions, and livelihood arrangements, people’s precarity is also shaped by
social factors such as their gender (Platt et al., 2017), age (Lain et al.,
2019), residency, and citizenship (Paret and Gleeson, 2016). Scholars
have examined some of these factors together and demonstrate how
they often intersect with each other to create variegated, multilayered
experiences of precarity (Canefe, 2018; Grenier et al., 2017). Gender,
age, and migration status are relevant to fully grasping the experiences
of three groups of my informants. I consider age and gender not as fixed
identities but as socially constructed categories, as they assign certain
roles, obligations, and expectations to people carrying these attributes
within the families, communities, and societies to which they belong

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 1. 2  Precarity a s Daily Struggle

(Cruikshank, 2013; West and Zimmerman, 1987). Precarity is there-

fore specific and experienced in different ways among men and women,
and older and younger people, not just for their physical and biologi-
cal characteristics but also for how they are socially positioned within
their families, their workplaces, or the labor market. As I will show in
Chapter 3, the way female workers make sense of their financial insta-
bility and future risks associated with household livelihood is interwo-
ven with their roles and obligations as spouses and mothers, which are
typical of the normative expectations of women in Vietnamese culture
(Hoang, 2016; Locke, Nguyen, and Nguyen, 2012). As they invoke
these roles and obligations when making sense of their experiences,
these female workers become one of the types of active agents who
contribute to reinforcing the influence of these gendered moral norms
in their lives. By contrast, the accounts about precarity told by the
former workers in a construction enterprise in Chapter 4 center around
their age. They understand their disadvantage from the perspectives of
their current employers and recruiters in the labor market: Older work-
ers in manufacturing industries (generally those above thirty-five years
of age) are viewed as less productive and physically capable (Người Lao
Động, 2017c). Such perception, among other factors, leads them to
seek early retirement several years before the stipulated retirement age
of sixty for male employees.
The precarity of factory workers and residents covered in Chapter
3 and Chapter 5 is further accounted for by their migration status. In
Vietnam, the household registration system has been a constraint on
many rural-to-urban migrants’ livelihood, adding to their already frag-
ile economic condition. The household registration system ties the
citizen to one legal residence, which determines their access to pub-
lic services, such as education and health care, and social assistance
from the local government. If migrants and temporary visa holders
who move across borders usually face social and institutional barriers
due to their legal residency status in the destination countries, inter-
nal migrant workers in Vietnam have to shoulder social and financial
burdens which in turn affect their sense of long-term stability in the
urban areas (Arnold, 2013; Oxfam, 2015). In mentioning these peo-
ple’s differing conditions and experiences, I do not mean to suggest, in
a general sense, that some groups are more precarious than others, such
as females versus males, older versus younger people, and urbanites ver-
sus migrants, because of their social identity and residency status. The
point is to acknowledge and analyze the extent to which these social

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factors intertwine with an individual’s economic condition to shape

their “complex, variable, fragmentary, and … quite particular” experi-
ences of precarity (Porta et al., 2015: 3).
The notion of precarity as daily struggle not only captures individu-
als’ vulnerability and their exposure to insecurity in life, but also their
adaptability and resilience, and sometimes resistance, to achieve better
and more dignified living and working conditions (Balcaite, 2019; Paret
and Gleeson, 2016; Tappe, 2019). This aspect of precarity recognizes
individuals’ coping and resisting strategies, carried out in resourceful
and creative ways, to solve their problems, pursue needs, or challenge
and subvert existing rules and power arrangements that have made
their life and work a struggle in the first place. In this respect, precarity
does not refer to a static condition but one that is fluid and subject to
change. To reiterate my point earlier in this chapter, because precarity
embodies individuals’ hopes and aspirations for change in challenging
times, the term is more appropriate to captivate the dynamics of daily
struggles of those who live and work in precarious conditions than
other similar terms such as uncertainty and vulnerability.
With the gap in social welfare provision left by formal institutions,
individuals living and working under precarious conditions have
mostly relied on their personal and social networks, and the informal
processes and practices associated with them, in order to alleviate
and overcome such conditions (Balcaite, 2019; Griffiths, 2019). In
Vietnam, these networks either exist beyond the purview of the state,
which include, for instance, kinship and communal ties seen among
communities of rural-to-urban migrants (Arnold, 2013; Trần, 2013),
or emerge and lie within the extended outreach of state institutions,
such as patron–client networks which serve to facilitate citizens’ access
to public services and assistance (Chaudhry, 2016). The relationships
established between the citizens and these networks are mostly prem-
ised on mutual trust and reciprocity, sometimes with the extraction
of bribes or material gains on the part of those who offer to provide
assistance and services.
Most of the informal networks and actors, as we will see in the
on-the-ground practices of social insurance, land, and housing issues,
emerge in the gap and shadow of law enforcement. Some examples
include, in Chapter 3, the brokers who make a profit out of factory
workers’ urgent need for money, by dealing with the workers through
a semilegal activity of “trading” social insurance books. In Chapter 4,
we learn about the intermediaries who exchange bribes between the

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 1. 3  Precarity and L aw

workers seeking early retirement, and the doctors in charge of these

workers’ health checks. And the actors who help facilitate the citi-
zens’ widespread construction activities which bypass the local state’s
construction regulations in Chapter 5 are the real estate brokers and
builders, many of whom actually have some connections with the state
authorities. As studies of everyday forms of corruption have shown, the
sociopolitical effects of these networks are mixed. On the one hand,
they act as important pathways for these people to attain needs, or
to obtain access to services or benefits that would not otherwise be
granted in a system where the law and law enforcement institutions are
either out of touch with the people or nonfunctioning (Smith, 2007).
On the other hand, engagement in these informal networks, which
usually involves extraction of bribes and material gains in exchange for
assistance and service, can disadvantage and impoverish these people
further, perpetuating the state of social inequality (Jeffrey, 2002). In
looking for ways to cope with uncertainty, my informants have turned
to these informal networks and corrupt practices, the prevalence of
which, as they are fully aware, is nevertheless typical of the functioning
of the broader legal and political system that has been skewed against
their interests.

1. 3  PR E CA R I T Y A ND L AW: A M U T UA LLY

R EI N F O RCI NG R E L AT IONSH IP
Confronted with the realities and challenges in their life, people have
attempted to solve their problems by routinely engaging in legal, semi-
legal, and illegal activities. These activities, which take place in mun-
dane settings, sometimes in a secretive manner, reveal in an important
way the complex nature of people’s decision-making in response to
their precarity and the paradoxical effects of law upon their lives. In
this section I will unpack the conceptual relationship between pre-
carity and law, with an aim to provide an alternative explanation not
just to the legal consciousness of low-income migrants and residents in
Vietnam – but also of those who are caught up living and working in
precarious and desperate conditions in any society where law can make
life worse rather than better.
Following sociolegal research that takes a process-oriented approach
to analyzing legal consciousness in everyday life (Engel and Munger,
2003: 12–13; Young, 2020), I posit that the relationship between
law and precarity is constituted by the following three-pronged,

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 L aw and Precarity in Daily Life

interconnected process. Central to this process are the dynamic, com-

plex interactions between law and other sets of norms, understand-
ings, and practices that go beyond the scope of law or extend from
it. In the first part of this process, experiences of precarity influence
the way people understand and perceive the law. The first part of this
process concerns the moral legitimacy of law within the life of these
citizens, that is, the extent to which law is welcomed and accepted, or
challenged and rejected by the people who are the beneficiaries of law
or targets of law enforcement. Living and working under precarious
and desperate conditions, they come to judge whether and how the
law is meaningful or beneficial to their lives, including their needs,
subsistence, or sense of stability, and whether and how it might offer a
solution to help improve their condition. In the construction of these
understandings, judgments, and perceptions, people draw upon ideals
and languages derived from the law as well as other sets of normative
structures, such as customary, traditional norms, or widely held beliefs
and practices that can be incompatible with law’s objectives and its
authority (Ellickson, 1991; Engel and Engel, 2010).
Chapters 3–5 of the book will tease out in detail the different ways
in which people exhibit their legal consciousness about issues such as
employment, social insurance, land, and housing, in response to their
own living conditions. Some people, such as the low-income factory
workers in light manufacturing industries, acknowledge the benefits of
the law, but they understand and interpret their legal rights in a way
that answers to their needs rather than conforms to the official legal
discourse propagated by government officials. Law is not only instru-
mental in pursuing needs, but is a central factor that shapes and con-
solidates the moral inclination to pursue those needs. Other people
project a view of rights and justice premised upon nonlegal, moral val-
ues which extend from or are at odds with formal legality. In the case
of retired workers and low-income aspiring homeowners, their under-
standings of justice derive from the ethics of subsistence and reciprocity
which has formed their relationship with the state and employer, and
from the communal, shared ethics of survival in which owning a house
is a symbol of autonomy and social stability, respectively. In these peo-
ple’s accounts, the invocation of the legalistic discourse of rights does
not convey a sense of empowerment but usually refers to conditions
and experiences of disadvantage, marginalization, and subordination.
The second part of the process that constitutes the relationship
between law and precarity is concerned with people taking action

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 1. 3  Precarity and L aw

to overcome their precarious circumstances. Viewing whether and

how the law is relevant, useful, or just, people decide to use, avoid, or
resist the law in a way that addresses their own circumstances. In its
actual implementation, law is nowhere straightforward or predictable,
but always ambiguous and uncertain, making it susceptible to various
interpretations and executions by different parties in pursuit of certain
interests and goals (Edelman, 1992; Gordon, 1984; Kuyucu, 2014). In
the legal and regulatory contexts surrounding social insurance, land,
and housing in Vietnam, this feature of the law has left ample room
for the people and their social networks to play around the rules in a
way that they believe may help achieve their goals and needs. Many
informants find the law flexible and negotiable, as they can bend or
circumscribe some of its stipulations and restrictions in a way that
stops short of apparently breaking the law. This is particularly the case
with several aspects of social insurance law, which are central to the
livelihood stories of current and retired workers, and which stipulate
conditions for early withdrawal of social insurance money and early
retirement. In the case of housing, the ambiguity of law enforcement
provides the informal space through which citizens can negotiate their
needs with the state according to a different kind of “law” that responds
to their ethics of survival.
As such, most of the activities that we will see in the chapters do
not fall neatly within the binary categories of what is lawful or unlaw-
ful. I have, at several places in this chapter, used the term semilegal
to refer to behavior that retains certain aspects of formal regulations
but is not really law-abiding, and indeed undermines law’s objectives
and authority (He, 2005). These kinds of behavior are not unique to
the informants in this study but are also commonly found in other
transitional economy contexts that have undergone significant legal
and social changes (Galligan, 2003; Su, 2018; Wallace, Shmulyar, and
Bedsir, 1999). When we situate those behaviors within people’s plans
to cope with uncertainty and achieve more stability, the fact that they
occur within a vague or negotiable area of law enforcement will then
determine the subsequent effects of law on their life circumstances.
The final part of the process that constitutes the relationship between
law and precarity is concerned with the outcomes of people’s coping
strategies: The particular way in which a person’s use, avoidance of, or
resistance to the law ends up perpetuating or maintaining their pre-
carity. The stability that they managed to achieve is either short term
or incomplete. Because their coping strategies unfold within the scope

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 L aw and Precarity in Daily Life

and boundary of the law rather than outside of it, they are subject
to rules, constraints, and sanctions imposed by the law. These peo-
ple come to experience exclusion, subordination, and even violence
as a result of their behavior. They are caught in another condition of
precarity, one that is still concerned with their everyday struggles to
sustain themselves and their family but takes on a new form which
embodies the exclusionary, sanctioning, and subordinating effects of
law. The outcomes in turn reconfigure people’s views and perceptions
of the law, as well as their relationships with other actors and stake-
holders involved in law enforcement practices. Even so, the law is not
“all over” these people’s lives, as, depending on the regulatory nature
of the issues and their own capabilities, they can then find ways to
either challenge or contest the outcomes, or take up new strategies and
measures to mitigate their precarity.

1.4   S T U DY I NG E V E RY DAY LE GA LI T Y I N V I E T NA M
This project began with my interest in exploring low-income factory
workers’ legal consciousness, and in particular their views and experi-
ences of social insurance law in Vietnam. One of the public debates
about this law that emerged within a few years of the start of my project
is related to employees’ early withdrawal of their pension. There was
plenty of media coverage about why many employees, especially fac-
tory workers in the export, light manufacturing industries, while still
of working age, preferred early withdrawal rather than continuing their
contribution to the social insurance fund which would allow them to
receive a monthly pension when they retire (for example, Người Lao
Động, 2017b, 2017i; Lao Động, 2013). The project initially set out to
examine the regulation of social insurance law, workers’ consciousness
of the law and their rights granted by this law, and to investigate the
social and legal challenges of workers’ early withdrawal. In a country
where the space for citizens to enjoy their political and civil rights is
still limited, and the use of courts and formal legal mechanisms has
been rare, ethnography provides the best method to understand various
experiences of law and forms of legal consciousness of ordinary citizens.
In line with other empirical studies of legal consciousness (Engel and
Munger, 2003; Marshall, 2003), I am particularly interested in address-
ing questions about the law through interviewees’ retelling of their
experiences and encounters in their residences, neighborhoods, and
workplaces, and sometimes at state agencies and offices. I embarked

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 1. 4  St u dyin g E v eryday L eg ality in Vietna m

on my fieldwork with some “foreshadowed problems” (Malinowski,

cited in Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007: 21) while getting prepared
for unplanned and unpredictable events and circumstances that could
happen in the field. Those unplanned and unpredictable circumstances
turned out to be fortuitous moments that allowed the project to take
on a different course and expand to address new, important issues of
Vietnamese law and society.
Inspired by the methodological approach of critical legal conscious-
ness studies, the fieldwork contributes to an understanding of legality
which comprises “the meanings, sources of authority, and cultural prac-
tices that are commonly recognized as legal” in Vietnam (Ewick and
Silbey, 1998: 22). By viewing legality as “an interpretative framework
and a set of resources with which and through which the social world
(including that part known as the law) is constituted” (Ewick and
Silbey, 1998: 23), my approach differs from existing sociolegal scholar-
ship in Vietnam that tends to take the formal, institutional framework
of law as its starting point.1 My research instead captures the localized,
socially constructed meanings and practices in which law may or may
not play a part as people recount their own experiences. These mean-
ings and practices emerge from the stories told by the people, and from
the routine, everyday encounters between them and other actors, such
as their employers, local authorities, friends, relatives, acquaintances,
and others. In this understanding, law, or indeed legality, is not a set of
abstract ideals, institutions, or authorities acting upon social life, but
emerges from it. Important aspects of laws such as notions of rights,
official legal discourse, and on-the-ground practices are constantly
debated and negotiated in routine conversations and encounters. In
their justifications of their needs, and decisions and strategies to pur-
sue these, my research participants contributed to the construction of
legality, as they drew upon ideals and language derived from the law as
well as other sets of normative structures, such as customs, traditions,
and beliefs widely held in the families, communities, and society.
During three periods of fieldwork in HCMC in 2018 and a short fol-
low-up field trip in 2019, I visited the homes and neighborhood areas of
the seventy research participants, who were introduced to me through
former contacts that I had established from a previous research project
in Vietnam, and through snowball sampling. Since “ethnography is a
mode of knowing that privileges experience – often going into realms

1
A detailed and critical discussion of sociolegal scholarship in Vietnam will follow in Chapter 2.

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 L aw and Precarity in Daily Life

of the social that are not easily discernible within the more formal
protocols” (Das and Poole, 2004: 4), the conversations and observa-
tions obtained through these visits provide a valuable and useful win-
dow into the nuances of people’s decision-making and the strategies
and tactics that they undertake to sustain themselves and their fam-
ily. Ethnography gets at the complicated nature of decision-making
and justifications for actions that appear “not rational” but enable
us to learn about important values and beliefs integral to the lives of
research participants and their communities. Ethnography provides
richer and more fine-grained details into legal consciousness as com-
pared to studies that rely on interviews, surveys, and media sources.
In many cases, my visits to the homes and neighborhoods of research
participants allowed me to discern the material condition of people’s
residences more clearly, and gave me a chance to hear family mem-
bers sharing and talking about any day-to-day activities of the house-
holds. For example, I especially enjoyed talking to the wives of the
former state workers who were more open than their husbands about
the economic condition of the households, and sometimes the past
and current health conditions of their husbands.2 My understanding of
the former state workers’ previous experiences at work and why they
sought early retirement was further enhanced by listening to conversa-
tions between workers and their family members who were working, or
used to work, in the same company. When it was not possible to visit
the homes of research participants, I and my research assistant made
arrangements for interviews and conversations at a convenient nearby
café. When possible, I gained further knowledge about these people’s
living arrangements through a number of visits to their residential
areas, especially during the weekend when most of them stay home.
Similar to scholars who take a sociological approach to law, I did
not frame my interview questions around formal and technical aspects
of the law, but focused on people’s livelihoods and employment. For
instance, my conversations with the migrant workers centered around
their working and living arrangements, their satisfaction or dissatis-
faction in the workplace, and any challenges that they face in feeding
2
I have noted elsewhere, in a different research project on workers’ legal consciousness in
Vietnam, how my gender and the gender of my research participants influenced the recruit-
ment process and the level of detail that I could obtain in the field (Nguyen, 2017b: 24). I
found throughout the fieldwork for this project that women are generally more open and com-
fortable than men about sharing their stories and opinions with me. I tried to overcome this
limitation by having a male informant accompany me to my interviews with male participants,
and having him facilitate these conversations.

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 1. 4  St u dyin g E v eryday L eg ality in Vietna m

themselves and their family. Their understandings and experiences of

social insurance law, as well as the exercise of their rights granted by
this law, emerged from these general conversations. When any par-
ticular legal issues were brought up, I encouraged my participants to
explain in further detail about the key, relevant decisions that they
have made: The factory workers’ decisions to withdraw their pensions,
the former state workers’ seeking early retirement, and the migrants’
and residents’ construction of their own houses on illegally acquired
agricultural lands. Woven within the stories shared by my research
participants were sentiments of desperation, disappointment, frustra-
tion, and anxiety, as well as allusions to hopeful changes. Through
everyday stories, encounters, and conversations circulating within the
communities I was able to draw out instances in which law is invoked,
negotiated, and contested, or simply avoided, and how practices and
meanings of law change as people negotiate and pursue their needs.
As the fieldwork progressed, people’s precarity and their experiences
of it became salient and formed the central thesis of this project. And
as the project evolved, issues of employment, social insurance, retire-
ment, and housing turned out to be most pertinent to a discussion of
precarity, and the way precarity enhances our understanding of legal
consciousness. Legal consciousness, as many studies have shown, is
complex, dynamic, and sometimes full of contradictions; indeed, those
are the very features that characterize the social life of law. As I moved
on to delve more closely into people’s stories, I began to see how var-
ying, often contradictory, expressions of legal consciousness are pro-
foundly intertwined with people’s life circumstances and their survival
strategies. Because the circumstances of different groups of participants
vary, I will provide more information about the social and economic
conditions of these participants and detailed methodological notes in
relevant empirical chapters. To protect the identity of participants, all
names used in this book are pseudonyms.
In short, this book proposes to examine a mutually reinforcing
relationship between law and precarity to enhance existing under-
standings of the role and power of law in daily life. My conceptual
framework suggests that the interactions between law and precarity
run both ways: Precarity influences and determines people’s engage-
ment with (or resistance to) the law, but such engagement also cre-
ates and sustains people’s precarity. The notion of precarity, which was
drawn mostly from the political economy literature, captures people’s
experiences of uncertainty and instability, as well as their capability

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 L aw and Precarity in Daily Life

and aspirations to improve their life conditions. In bringing in the

notion of precarity, this book contributes to the emerging scholarship
on law and society in Vietnam and the literature of legal consciousness
by drawing attention to the complex nature of people’s life circum-
stances and how they both shape and are shaped by the paradoxical,
double-edged effects of law upon their lives. It demonstrates that, to
the people who are enmeshed in desperate and uncertain conditions,
law offers a solution to their everyday problems when there are lim-
ited available options, but a solution that can ultimately disadvantage
them further. Caught in a double bind, my informants have been una-
ble to endure the present state of living or to fully escape from it. To
invoke, manipulate, or resist the law only serves to reinforce, rather
than permanently break, the cycle of precarity.

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