8 Weakening of social protection in Vietnam: labour legislation, cicada capital and civil society

Using findings from a 2023 case study on Vietnamese workers in the wood-processing industry and critical content analysis of changes in the labour codes, social insurance laws and annual minimum wage increase policy, I demonstrate how the state’s rhetoric of ‘universal social coverage’ for workers has facilitated the recommodification phase, an authoritarian turn, in the ‘cycle of commodification’ ( Lin and Nguyen, 2021 ). I argue that the expansion of informal labour and unchecked prevalence of ‘cicada capitalism’ are enabled by weakening labour legislation, even weaker state enforcement of social protection laws, and suppression of civil society’s labour advocacy – leaving workers on their own to deal with abusive employers without legal recourse and state protection.