Civil Servants' Unions in Colonial Vietnam

Paul Sager, PhD Candidate, History, NYU

Labor organizations appeared among French and Vietnamese civil servants in colonial Indochina around the turn of the twentieth century. They quickly developed the leverage to bring governors into unofficial but decisive wage negotiations. Dealing with the unions became an unavoidable aspect of colonial governance. French and Vietnamese employee groups remained strictly separate and mutually antagonistic until the 1930s when a fiscal crisis led to the radicalization of French civil servants, who opened membership in their unions to their Vietnamese coworkers and underlings. Franco-Vietnamese civil service unionism remained vital until the early 1950s, and Vietnamese unions became an important part of the Diem regime. The overlooked history of unions among civil servants shows that the state faced internal as well as external challenges and adds dimensionality to our picture of colonial society and politics.

Paul Sager is a graduate student in French history at New York University. The title of his dissertation is "The Politics of State Employment in French Colonial Indochina, 1898-1954."

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