Breaking from Contractual Bonds: Vietnamese Plantation Workers’ Desertions and the Criminalization of a Labour Force

• In Event: 22. Forging Power and Space: Vietnamese Workers’ Acts of Resistance in an Evolving Political Landscape

Abstract

Starting in 1905, the expansion of plantation economies in French Indochina exerted tremendous pressure on the more populated regions of Tonkin and Annam to provide a labour force to counter what some referred to as the “crise de la main-d’oeuvre” in the more sparsely populated rural areas of Cochinchina and Cambodia. Often recruited under dubious circumstances, Tonkinese and Annamese workers were shipped en masse to these areas where they faced significant, and often deadly, challenges: insalubrious work and living spaces; low wages and insufficient food; debt; overwork; and, violence at the hands of supervisors. Archival documents such as plantation and police reports reveal that in Cambodia in particular, desertions were commonplace and that many workers left the plantations, sometimes by the hundreds, whether to attempt to return to Tonkin or Annam, or to plead for their rights at the offices of local colonial administrators. As their memos and correspondence with the various levels of the colonial administration reveal, planters responded to these actions by convincing colonial authorities to set in place regulations to discourage workers from breaking their contractual bonds. The result was the criminalization of a labour force, whereby workers who left the plantations became fugitives from the law, appearing as “wanted” in police bulletins and facing penalties that included the return to the plantation, fines or imprisonment. This paper therefore analyzes this process of criminalization, which began with the police issuance of identity papers for workers, and which ended with severe sanctions for those who left the plantations.

Author

• Micheline R. Lessard, University of Ottawa