Phnom Penh Post
By Shane Worrell
In a country where corruption is as rife as it is in Cambodia, global
brands must work with governments to ensure garment factories are safe
and working conditions legal, international NGO Transparency
International (TI) said yesterday.
Responding to reports that
some retailers will leave Bangladesh following the Rana Plaza factory
collapse that killed more than 1,100 people in April, TI said brands
should instead work towards safer, less corrupt markets in countries
from which they buy.
In Cambodia, where two workers were killed
when a ceiling collapsed at the Wing Star Shoes factory on May 16,
corruption is more extreme than in Bangladesh, TI said.
According to TI, 0 suggests extreme corruption, while 100 makes a country “highly clean”.
Cambodia scored 22, making it perceived as more corrupt than Bangladesh (26), Pakistan (27) and Vietnam (31).
“This suggests widespread corruption risk, which could make safety inspection vulnerable to bribery,” a statement from TI says.
Leng
Tong, director of the Ministry of Labour’s occupational health and
safety department, said corruption had been an issue among some
government officials whose work focused on the garment sector.
“We’ve
investigated certain officials who have taken money while inspecting
factories,” he said, without elaborating on how many. “We have suspended
them.”
Those officials, however, were not actually fired, he added.
Jason
Judd, a technical specialist for the International Labour
Organization’s monitoring program Better Factories Cambodia (BFC),
declined to comment on whether corruption was as prevalent in the
garment sector as elsewhere in the country. BFC’s compliance
assessments, which focus primarily on working conditions, did not cover
some issues raised by TI, including bribery and collusion when it came
to licensing and permits, he said.
Dave Welsh, American Center
for International Labor Solidarity country manager, said brands,
factories and the government needed to respond better to issues raised
by BFC.
Welsh added that because Ministry of Labour officials
were underpaid, “perhaps they are less inclined to do their jobs and
more susceptible to alternative modes of payment”.
Additional reporting by Mom Kunthear
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