The foliowing are excerpts from an article
written for New Times by Pravda’s correspon-
dent in Indo-China. Both the article and the
Japan Press Service photos were issued prior
to the unification of North and South Vietnam

on July 2, 1976.

Tis story is told that back in the 1920s the
wealthy industrialists, businessmen and
planters of Saigon’s Chamber of Commerce
clubbed together to build its palatial edifice
of refined classical elegance complete with
friezes, columns and a marble staircase. The
embellishments were completed on the
morning of the day, announced well in ad-
vance, of the opening ceremony. Inspecting
preparations for the gala evening reception,
the French governor and colonial officer of
public works, believing the upstairs flooring
might cave in under the combined weight of
the invited guests, ordered the main hall to
be heaped with sacks of earth by way of a
test. Since this meant hauling the several
thousand sacks up and down again, a job that
would take several days, the contractors
suggested using cheap labor instead, as it
was always available. Around a thousand
workers were herded into the hall for the
test. Luckily for them, the floor did not give
way.
The 50-odd years since then were atime of
uphill struggle for Saigon’s working man to
be accepted as a human being, not as a sub-
stitute for a sack of earth. Neither the bullets
of the colonial legion nor the clubs and tear
gas of the puppet police could check the surg-
ing tide of the workingclass movement. In
the 1920s the Communist Party of Indo-China
came to head the proletariat of Vietnam, and
this struggle entered a new phase. Foreign
Big Business more and more often encoun-
tered organized resistance from the for-
merly unskilled laborers, who were now fully
aware of their political and economic rights.

At the close of April 1975, the workers,
sons and grandsons of those Saigon workers,
who today dwell in Binh Hoa, the city’s most
proletarian of proletarian neighborhoods,
disarmed some 30,000 puppet soldiers and
police in the space of a few minutes.

L. the forecourt of the borough council,
activists of the workers’ militia were holding
a meeting. It was infernally hot, and the 40
men and women present lolled in the shade of
the two-story building’s yellow-tinted wallon
seats removed from autos.

‘“‘There’s no room for us in the old council
building. It’s occupied now by the revolutio-
nary committee,” Ly Hong Cam, a member
of the presidium of the district party organi-
zation, explained. ‘‘The old regime did not
provide for such democratic parliamentary
procedures.”

We at once set off ona tour of the district’s
factories, weaving through a maze of wind-
ing alleys, the walls of whose-grimy-houses

concealed a web of cracks and blotchy dis- .

clorations beneath an upper layer of bluish
powder. In these squalid surroundings, the
modernist cubes of the new Sacimen factory,
which makes woolen and acrylon blankets,

’ looked like something from another planet.

Our driver went off to get us passes. As for
Ly Hong Cam, though he was welcomed as
an old friend, the vigilant workers’ guard
wrote out a pass for him too. While these
formalities were under way, I listened. to a
brief lecture about the district’s economic
potential. I learned that it had a population of
230,000 and boasted 29 enterprises, factories
and workshops, which under the old regime
had operated in fits and starts, with the re-
sult that four-fifths of the labor force was
unemployed. Besides tackling this problem,
the new administration also had to find jobs
for another 17,000 servicemen of the old pup-
pet army. Incidentally, in the several
months since liberation, many of these
former soldiers showed themselves to be ac-
tive supporters of social reform.

Finally the gates swung open and the fac-
tory manager, Ba Duc, came out to meet us.
He kept us only five minutes in his office,
whose metal furniture included a desk with
an attached swivel chair. We were then
taken on a tour of the shops. As we crossed

the impeccably tidy but totally empty fac-
tory yard, Ba Duc took the opportunity to
exchange a few words with the representa-
tive of the district party committee.
Though a veteran of the revolution with 12
years in the underground resistance move-
ment, Ly Hong Cam is still young, only 30
years old. And while the problems he is now
called upon to tackle are of a completely dif-
ferent order, they demand the same staunch
and selfless dedication as during the struggle
against the puppet regime. To run the indus-
try of an entire district is not easy — all the
more since only one engineer, a Vietnamese,

- stayed on. All the others, from Japan,

France, the Philippines and Taiwan, quit the
moment their former bosses told them to go.

Ba Duc, previously a foreman and a
Communist who had been in an underground
resistance cell in the old days, now spends his
evenings poring over various technical
books; as general manager it behooves him
to make technically and economically cor-
rect decisions. ;

“Today,” he explained, ‘“‘we have 650
workers, more than before, as we rehired all
those the old bosses had kicked out for going
on strike, plus a good number of jobless.
Earnings average 15,000 piastres.”’

‘What were they before?”’ i

“An average of 6,000. The manager re-
ceived a salary of 280,000, while the en-
gineers and foremen got between 70,000 and
100,000.’’

“Did you also get 70,000?”

‘Vag’.

‘And now?”’

“Now I receive the same as any skilled
workers — 36,000.’’

“We still haven’t decided how much
Communists should get,” Ly Hong Cam ad-
ded. ‘‘I must say that in the old days Com-
rade Ba Duc used to donate most of his earn-
ings to the underground resistance cell. This
was of great help to many comrades who had
been forced to hide. At the present time we
are working on a politically and economi-
cally based pay scale and will have'the mat-
ter settled very soon.”

“How many Communists are there at the
factory today?”’

“Only three,’’ Ba Duc replied. ‘‘There
were more but they perished in a concentra-
tion camp after an informer delivered the
cell into the hands of the police. However, we
have about 150 progressive-minded and
class-conscious workers backing us all the
way. They comprise the backbone of our
self-defense unit and of the Liberation Trade
Union which looks after production. We re-
gard the new trade union associations as the
party’s helper in economic recovery and ad-
vancement.”

When I stepped into the factory shop, my
ears were assailed by adeafening racket and
my nostrils by clouds of miniscule particles,
tiny bits of woolen and acrylon fluff floating
in the humid air. I walked over to the yarn-
making machines and then to the

machines at the head of the conveyor belt. .

They were all of Japanese or American
make. With lightning speed they braided
the yarn into lengths of heavy, thickish fab-
ric from which the blankets were produced
with the same fantastic tempo. Not one
superfluous operation.

As the shop superintendent approached, I
gestured at the columns of dust spiralling up
from the floor. There was too much noise to
converse, and he indicated a tiled corridor
leading to a door marked ‘“‘Repair Room.”
As the door banged shut behind us on its hy-
draulic springs, the din abruptly ceased.
Spread out on the floor was a huge tangle of
metal rods, nettings, pipes and fan blades.
This was a ventilation unit which fitter Buy
Deu Hanh and his assistant Nguyen Dia Xa
were putting together from their own design.

“Every time we went on strike before,”
Hanh said, ‘‘we used to demand proper venti-
lation among other things. But only when we
got the factory under our own control, were
we able to:get down to this business in ear-
nest.”’

L. Saigon, renamed after Ho Chi Minh, I
often had occasion to meet worker activists
in neighborhoods where a man in overalls
bad hardly ever been seen before. Now you

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—SEPTEMBER 17, 1976—Page 6

could see them in the former Parliament
building at sessions of the NLF City Commit-
tee. As representatives of the Military Ad-
ministrative Committee and the revolutio-
nary committees of the various ministries

and offices of the Provisional Revolutionary .

Government, they had taken over public
buildings in the downtown section and man-
sions whose opulent former owners had fled.

Young men and women from the worker
militia and the student units marched down
Tu Do Street and Le Loi Avenue. In the
cafés, tearooms and bars quite a different
clientele sipped various beverages — Liber-
ation Armymen, port workers and em-
ployees of the revolutionary committees.
One day in Nguyen Hue Avenue, as I was
taking snapshots of the milling crowds, I 2

ie