A rubber-stamp parliament approving an arcane international convention might not seem like something that has the potential to create huge changes in Vietnamese society. On Friday, June 14, however, the country’s National Assembly ratified the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention 98 on collective bargaining and the right to organize. This is big news — by ratifying the Convention, Vietnam has put a number of antagonisms and tensions in motion.

The ILO is the UN agency for labor standards. Two of its conventions — Convention 87, on freedom of association and protection of the right to organize, and Convention 98, on the right to organize and collective bargaining — are seen as fundamental to the basic ability of independent trade unions to function and operate freely without state or employer interference. Convention 98 allows for workers to be protected against anti-union discrimination, and for workers’ and employers’ organizations to operate without interference from each other. Convention 87 allows workers to establish and join unions of their own choosing without prior authorization.

At present Vietnam has only one legal, state-led trade union federation, the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL), which is neither independent of the ruling Communist Party nor of employers. Independent unions are currently forbidden. At the national level, the VGCL is subordinated to the party, while at the enterprise level it is dominated by managers. It is not uncommon for a workplace union representative to be the company’s human resources director or similar.