Organization Woman

And can the women sewing in the next building afford to buy them? Probably not. Clearly, this factory fails the Henry Ford test. Ford famously decided to pay his workers $5 a day back in 1914 because he thought it was good corporate and industrial policy to pay wages sufficiently high so that the men who built the Model T could afford to buy one. The women working here—and 80 percent of Vietnam's apparel workers are women—make about $6 to $7 a day.

Madame Nguyen, pausing to chatter on her cell phone, led us on a fast-paced tour of the facility, which led to my first conflicted liberal moment of the week. By any standard, this was basically a sweatshop—rows of young women bent over sewing machines, doing piecework. The New Deal liberal in me, who can't walk past the former headquarters of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company near New York University without imagining the flames and the screams, finds a deep injustice in the fact that $60 shirts are made by such low-wage workers, with the profits largely accruing to middlemen and the owners of Tommy Hilfiger. The neoliberal in me, who fancies himself a hard-headed observer of the global economy, knows that for large parts of the world—including Vietnam—these clean, bright, and well-ventilated sheds represent a significant step up. In a country where nearly one-third of the population lives on $2 a day, a job that pays $6 a day—and offers shares of stock in the company—is progress.

Our interactions with Vietnamese people—mediated as they were by translators and language barriers—contained few ironic moments. It could just be that they didn't get my attempts at humor. More likely still, it's difficult to appreciate the ironies of history when you're rushing headlong into the 21st century. The brand managers of the Hilton chain evidently thought it would not induce cognitive dissonance to open an opulent Hanoi Hilton. And as Madame Nguyen spoke in the patois of a Harvard MBA, she did so under the watchful gaze of Ho Chi Minh. One of my colleagues asked what the guy in the painting behind her would think of all this talk about currencies and a high-end domestic apparel market. "He's not behind us," Madame Nguyen said. "He's above us. In our hearts and minds, Ho Chi Minh is our spiritual leader." And she was certain he would approve.

Of course, it may be premature to regard Vietnamese state-owned companies as perfect analogues to American firms. When we asked about the benefits workers received, something was clearly lost in translation. "In January, the best worker gets to go to the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum."

© 2007