The labour market effects in Southeast Asia of the COVID-19 pandemic have attracted considerable analysis from both scholars and practitioners. However, much less attention has been paid to the pandemic’s impact on legal protections for workers’ and unions’ rights, or to what might account for divergent outcomes in this respect in economies that share many characteristics, including a strong export orientation in labour-intensive industries and weak industrial relations institutions. Having described the public health measures taken to control the spread of COVID-19 in Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam, this article analyses governments’ employment-related responses and their impact on workers and unions in the first year of the pandemic. Based on this analysis, we conclude that the disruption caused to these countries’ economies, and societies, served to reproduce existing patterns of state–labour relations rather than overturning them.

COVID-19大流行在东南亚对劳动力市场的影响吸引了学者和从业人员的大量分析。但是，人们对这种流行病对工人和工会权利的法律保护的影响，或在具有许多特征的经济体在这方面可能导致不同结果的关注较少，而这些经济体具有很多特征，包括在劳动密集型国家中强烈的出口导向工业和薄弱的劳资关系机构。在描述了为控制COVID-19在印度尼西亚，柬埔寨和越南的蔓延而采取的公共卫生措施之后，本文分析了政府在大流行第一年中与就业有关的应对措施及其对工人和工会的影响。根据此分析，我们得出的结论是，这些国家/地区的经济和社会受到了破坏，