4 - Made-to-Aspire: How Migrant Factory Workers' Future-making Constructed through Entrepreneurship Pursuit

Every day, millions of factory workers in Vietnam spend hours in the assembling lines of globally engaged enterprises, contributing significantly to the country’s feted economic development. Factory jobs, however, are not desirable given their low wage, low social status, little social protection, and high control over workers’ labour, making it difficult for workers to ensure their long-term well-being, provide for the family, or gain social respect. Many migrant factory workers, especially those who are young and single parents, turn to self-entrepreneurship as an alternative path to accumulate wealth and have a self-determined and recognized personhood.

This paper explores how workers’ entrepreneurial aspirations are shaped by different conditions under Vietnam’s market socialism. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork, it shows how self-entrepreneurship is marketed by the market and the state as the most viable way to achieve self-improvement, autonomy beyond the production line, and economic freedom. While this promise seems to respond perfectly to workers’ desires given these individuals’ specific social positions, gender, and class, it is relatively illusory due to the high risks of self-entrepreneurship. Furthermore, their future-making pursuits are subjected to consumerism and entrepreneurism imperatives from the state that induce individuals to be self-enterprising and self-responsible for their well-being while proving themselves worthy as gendered persons and citizens. The paper argues that the pursuit of entrepreneurship among migrant factory workers only instrumentally deflects attention from the need for better work conditions and welfare system, rather than helping attain workers’ aspiration of long-term well-being and a good life.