Lawyer Le Tan Ty (seated, wearing glasses) has become a pillar in defending the rights of many workers in Dong Nai.

Born with a disability, Le Tan Ty (39 years old, Dong Nai) has overcome many barriers and feelings of inferiority to build a place for himself in society on his own disabled legs. Even more admirable, in hundreds of court sessions, he has fought the trial panel, fellow lawyers and employers… to protect the lawful rights and interests of hundreds of poor workers who were sacked, beaten and deprived of their honest wages…

In particular, when he had just graduated, many places rejected him, but the provincial Labour Federation agreed to take him on. To date, he and his colleagues at the Trade Union Legal Advice Centre of the Dong Nai provincial Labour Federation have successfully claimed billions of VND in compensation from employers for workers.

Determined to “fight” managers who beat women workers

Lawyer Le Tan Ty is currently the most active officer in labour disputes in which the Trade Union Legal Advice Centre provides advice and defends workers in court. All of these cases are defended by lawyers voluntarily and free of charge, in keeping with the spirit of the centre established by the Dong Nai trade union organisation.

Unfolding a sheet of A4 paper folded in four, taken from his bag, Mr. Ty carefully crosses out a labour dispute he has just successfully defended on 19 September, helping two former security guards of Indovina Bank Ltd. in Dong Nai receive 300 million VND. This is just one of dozens of cases Mr. Ty is pursuing, listed on his A4 sheet. Lawyer Le Tan Ty said: “Workers, with their limited education and low understanding of labour law, are often bullied by employers. Meanwhile, employers have a whole advisory apparatus to help them. So when a labour dispute arises, workers are not strong enough to ‘fight’ their bosses. That is why the centre’s staff in general, and I in particular, work wholeheartedly for workers, especially poor workers”.

One of the complex cases the lawyer supported and pursued for many years before finally winning was the case reported by Lao Dong newspaper in the article “Alarm over workers being beaten and mistreated”. It was the case of Ms. L.T.B. Sau (born 1967), who worked as a worker at a wood company in Bien Hoa City, Dong Nai Province. At the end of 2011, when Ms. Sau went to work, the manager – the son of the company’s owner, born in 1984 – beat her with a wooden chair, leaving Ms. Sau in Dong Nai General Hospital’s emergency department with a shattered lower end of both bones in her left forearm and nerve damage. According to the forensic assessment, Ms. Sau suffered an overall disability rate of 37%, lost her ability to work, and lost 40 million VND in medical expenses that her family had borrowed from friends and relatives; Ms. Sau had to stay at home with her husband and son, both workers, in a room of less than 10 square metres.

On the day Ms. Sau came to the Trade Union Legal Advice Centre to call for help, the reporter happened to be there and witnessed it: Ms. Sau’s arm was still in a cast. Everyone at the centre could not hold back their tears and outrage. Lawyer Le Tan Ty recalled: “At that time I was extremely outraged and promised myself I would see this through to demand justice for Ms. Sau”. After that, Mr. Ty immediately drafted petitions to help Ms. Sau, called on the authorities, forced the police to investigate and temporarily detain the offender for intentionally causing injury. Mr. Ty also volunteered to defend Ms. Sau’s rights in court; as a result, the offender was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay Ms. Sau 70 million VND in compensation. “At that trial, although we won, I cried. I cried with joy at winning justice back for a worker in difficulty” – Mr. Ty shared his feelings.

Winning billions for workers…

The first case, in which the Dong Nai trade union organisation represented workers and sued employers, taken on by lawyer Ty, was a case that once shocked the whole country. Lawyer Ty said that the event in which the Long Khanh Town Labour Federation, for the first time in the country, represented a group of workers in suing Company H (100% foreign-owned) for failing to pay social insurance and health insurance for workers in 2008 attracted public attention at the time. At that time, he was assigned by his superiors to collect evidence, build the case against the company and defend workers’ rights throughout the court’s handling of the lawsuit. Before the trial, he could not help worrying, but he suppressed it and presented the most convincing evidence to persuade the trial panel and counter the employers. As a result, the workers won the case, and the Dong Nai Provincial People’s Court ordered Company H to pay 1.4 billion VND in social insurance and health insurance for the workers. “After that case, many trade union officials from provinces and cities who came to work in Dong Nai Province were surprised to learn that the lawyer who defended workers and won 1.4 billion VND was me – a young man, and even more surprisingly, a person with a disability” – lawyer Ty said with a smile.

Lawyer Ty had a harder childhood than other children. He came from a poor farming family in Dinh Quan District (Dong Nai). When he was six years old, he caught polio, which left his legs wasted, and every attempt at treatment was futile. With his legs wasted, Mr. Ty walked with difficulty on wooden crutches. To go to school, he had to get up at 5am and walk to the main road to wait for a lift on a rubber-tapping truck to school. “The hardest thing was in the rainy season, when the roads were slippery; if I was not careful I would fall. Also thanks to all that walking, my legs gradually became stronger and I could walk by myself, without wooden crutches,” Mr. Ty said.

At 18, Ty looked at his legs and worried about his future. “I chose law because I thought that in life, the law is very important; everything you do ‘involves’ the law, and the profession also requires less use of my legs,” lawyer Ty confided. That year, Mr. Ty passed the entrance exam to the Law Faculty of Ho Chi Minh City General University. After graduating, he returned to Dong Nai to look for work, but everywhere he went he was met with a shake of the head; in some places, as soon as the guard saw him, he was chased away without his application even being looked at. Unable to find work in Bien Hoa City, he went back to his home district of Dinh Quan, but it was hopeless.

Rejected so many times but not desperate, he came up with a new ‘trick’. Whenever he met a guard, he would say he was going in to see the leaders about something, then march straight in to see them and present his case. Fortunately for him, the leaders of the Labour Federation at the time agreed to take him on, at a salary of 180,000 VND a month. His daily work was recording incoming and outgoing documents and receiving workers’ petitions… The salary was so low that he wrote news articles for newspapers to earn extra income, but it only just covered his own living costs. Mr. Ty kept striving, and in 2003 he passed the exam for lawyer training.

Now, in Dong Nai, lawyer Ty is a pillar for workers and a source of fear for many employers when they face him in court. With many years of experience in labour cases and many ‘victories’ in the form of billions of VND won back for workers, whenever a reporter attends a labour trial where the defendant is an employer, lawyer Ty always appears very confidently and usually holds the upper hand in every labour trial. “Many lawyers invited by employers from Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi have been out-argued by lawyer Ty; and at the Bien Hoa City Court and the Dong Nai Provincial Court, lawyer Ty always receives a respectful look from the judges” – a fellow lawyer said of lawyer Ty.