Trần's monograph Ties that bind: Cultural identity, class, and law in Vietnam's labour resistance is a theoretically grounded analysis of labour resistance in Vietnam from the French colonial period to the current era of accelerated globalisation. Data sources include publications on French-colonial-period labour unrest, newspapers in the past six decades, and 41 interviews, mainly in southern Vietnam, with workers, labour resistance organisers, reporters, and a few enterprise managers/owners and state and union officials. The examined forms of resistance range from public denunciation of labour exploitation and labour regulation/contract violations, to work stoppages and strikes. The resistance can be of the Polanyi-type, based on ‘the need to protect social substances imperiled by the “self-regulating” market’ (p. 8), and taking the form of a fight ‘against labour commodification for human dignity, justice, and self-preservation’ (ibid.). Or the resistance can be of the Marxist type, ‘based on class, and on the fight against capitalist exploitation for better wages and other labour rights’ (ibid). Or the resistance can combine both types.

In Ties that bind capitalists and management are portrayed as highly exploitative. Trần also suggests that the current Vietnamese state, despite its socialist rhetoric, has tried to control labour unrest in order to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and that its executive and judicial branches in numerous cases have sided with foreign and domestic capital. For example, from 1999 to 2006, despite the cumulative inflation rate of 35 per cent, the Vietnamese state did not adjust the minimum wage in the foreign sector, thus allowing the exploitation of Vietnamese workers by foreign capitalists. The minimum wage was also considerably lower in the domestic sector than in the foreign sector, thus allowing the exploitation of workers by domestic capital. Enterprise-based union leaders tend not to support work stoppages or strikes because they act in accordance with state guidelines and because they receive their union salaries from enterprise management. Through its hộ khẩu (household registration) system, the current Vietnamese state erects institutional barriers against migrant workers who constitute a significant part of contemporary industrial labour in Vietnam. Trần suggests that this has led to higher rent and utility rates for migrant workers, as well as educational disadvantages for their children (pp. 190ff.). Courts have either ruled in favour of capital and against Vietnamese labourers, or caused considerable delay in rulings, partly by sending cases from one court to another. In Ties that bind workers' lives in contemporary Vietnam are portrayed as quite bleak, necessitating considerable overtime work in order to make up for non-livable wages. However, Trần also argues that the current Vietnamese state is not monolithic. Labour-union newspapers, despite being controlled by the state, have published many stories on workers' hardships, labour exploitation and law/contract violation by management, as well as workers' denunciations of law/contract violation.

Following James Scott in his book Domination and the arts of resistance, Trần argues that Vietnamese workers neither consent nor resign to their exploitation. She suggests that cultural identity (i.e., based on religion, gender, birthplace, ethnicity, and nationality) constitutes a very important basis for relations among workers, and in quite a number of cases, serves as a basis for labour mobilisation. Trần suggests that class consciousness, instead of being a prerequisite for labour resistance, may emerge in the process of resistance. Ties that bind thus argues against the dominant perspective in Marxist analyses that strong cultural and ethnic identities lead to labour fragmentation or division, and hinder collective action.

Trần's monograph would have been strengthened with a more systematic study of workers' quotidian discourses, daily practices, and communities/networks, as well as, given the importance of migrants in the industrial labour force of contemporary Vietnam, with a more systematic comparison of migrant workers' to local ones' living conditions. Specifically, through my own research and my reading of publications on contemporary Vietnamese migrants, I have not seen any convincing evidence that migrants have to pay higher rents than local residents. I find unconvincing the statement ‘[migrant] children are forced to attend overcrowded public schools (if space is available at all) because the workers cannot afford the cost of private schools' (p. 192). In fact, private schools in Vietnam are beyond the reach of most Vietnamese families. Most children, no matter whether from migrant or local resident families, attend more affordable and crowded public schools. I also think that Trần's focus on workers' denunciation and labour unrest leads to a uniformly bleak portrayal of labour conditions in foreign and domestic private sectors in contemporary Vietnam, to the overlooking of their possible variation, and to a lack of analysis regarding the variations in labour unrest among foreign factories in Vietnam in the past quarter of a century. More specifically, there have been more instances of labour unrest and workers' denunciation of labour practices in Taiwanese and South Korean enterprises than in Japanese ones. For another example, in the domestic sector, in rural Vietnam, there are numerous small handicraft workshops where owners and workers are strongly related by kinship and neighbourly ties, and where we do not hear much about labour unrest or workers' denunciation of exploitation. The cases of labour unrest and workers' denunciation analysed in Ties that bind constitute an important part of the labour scene in contemporary Vietnam, but do they provide the entire picture on labour conditions and workers' action? In 2006, there were a large number of strikes; it would be useful to analyse the percentage of industrial workers who participated in these strikes, and the reasons why a good percentage of workers did not. To have a fuller understanding of the reasons for non-participation, I think that we need to study in greater depth workers' discourses, practices, and social relations in their daily lives. Such a study may provide a stronger support for the argument that Vietnamese workers neither consent nor resign to their exploitation. Or it may require a modification of the author's thesis.

Beyond substantive points, there are some typographical and calculation errors as well as minor analytical ones (pp. 18, 126, 129, 254). For example, the author mentions that inflation in Vietnam increased between 1929 and 1933 (p. 18). However, available data show that prices dropped significantly in Vietnam and elsewhere during the Great Depression. For another example, citing official Vietnamese statistics, Trần states ‘Investment in manufacturing (1998–2008) involved the lowest amount of registered capital’ (p. 129), while the 2008 Vietnamese statistical yearbook (p. 104) reports, for the 1998 to 2008 period, US$81 billion of registered capital investment in manufacturing (about 50 per cent of registered capital in all approved FDI projects).

In general, I think that Trần's thesis on the importance of cultural identity in workers' daily lives and protest mobilisation is tenable. As a whole, Trần's monograph Ties that bind makes an important contribution to our understanding of Vietnam's political economy and labour relations in the past century. Future researchers on labour in Vietnam may not agree entirely with Trần's analysis and arguments, but I believe that they will significantly benefit from her research.