About 300 laborers at a Nike factory were fired yesterday after
massive protests for better wages, part of a worldwide reflection on
developing world factory conditions after the tragedy in Bangladesh.
Cambodia's garment industry is increasingly considered the moral alternative to that of scandal-ridden Bangladesh. But this week a Nike clothing factory there fired some 300 workers after they protested for weeks about low wages.
Cambodia’s garment industry represents almost 80 percent of its
exports, and with more than 300 factories and about 350,000 employees it
is the booming heart of Cambodian economic life. For that reason, the
government has aggressively polished the industry’s image over the past
decade to reel in foreign retailers. But analysts say that much of the
touted reforms are just gloss, lacquered onto a reality rife with
abuses.
“It’s part of its marketing strategy,” says Kimberly
Elliott, a senior fellow at The Center for Global Development. “The idea
is to give buyers some assurance that they won’t face a sweatshop
scandal.”
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In May, about 4,000 Cambodian laborers stood outside a Nike clothing
factory in Kampong Speu Province, just outside the urban capital, Phnom
Penh. Earning a monthly wage of $74, the workers wanted an additional
$14 a month to help pay the costs of transportation, rent, and health
care. They would not go back to work without it.
Factory owners fired some 300 employees, claiming they didn’t follow labor union rules of protest.
The
mass firing comes on the heels of heightened international attention on
the working conditions in the garment industry. Last month a
Bangladeshi garment complex collapsed, killing more than 1,000 workers
in the largest garment industry accident in recent history.
That
accident brought Cambodia’s industry – billed as a still cheap but more
ethically sound place to do business – into focus. In 1999, as part of
the US-Cambodia Bilateral Textile Trade Agreement, the Cambodian
government allowed the International Labor Organization
to set up Better Factories Cambodia, a program that requires all
factories to submit to regular ILO inspections. In exchange, Cambodia
was promised better access to US markets. When the agreement ended in
2005, the Cambodian government chose to continue the initiative, and it
is now a participant in the ILO’s global Better Work program.
Nuanced protections
The
Southeast Asian country was recently ranked among the most corrupt
countries in the world. And while workers’ protections do exist in
Cambodia, the nuance of those protections is important.
A 2011
report from a Yale University human rights team found that Cambodian
garment factories overwhelmingly use short-term contracts that exclude
them from rights outlined in Cambodia’s labor law.
And while a
Better Work report that year found that almost all Cambodian factories
allowed unions and strikes, it also noted that none of the 27 strikes
documented at those factories were in compliance with the Cambodian
Labor Law, which requires workers to give seven working days notice
before going on strike.
“One of the things to remember with the
compliance analysis is that [it] is only checking for compliance with
national law,” says Raymond Robertson, one of the authors of the Better
Work report and a professor of economics at Macalester College in
Minnesota.
Cambodia’s own labor laws sometimes violate good labor
practices, say analysts, which means that companies complying with the
laws will pass inspection while not necessarily treating their workers
fairly.
That was the case when the Nike protesters were let go this week.
Some
of the fired workers included people caught destroying factory property
when the protests turned violent after four days. Yet others were
dismissed for violating an internal factory rule that says workers
absent for more than seven days must have permission to do so. Without
permission they will be “deemed to have abandoned their jobs,” said Ken
Loo, secretary general of the Garment Manufacturers Association of
Cambodia, in an e-mail.
Workers in that category “have been
requested to present themselves and inform the company if they wish to
continue working,” Mr. Loo said, adding that they have not been
officially dismissed, contradicting reports from the Free Trade Union
that all the workers were fired without benefits. “If they no longer
wish to continue working, the company will then calculate all relevant
wages and benefits due to them under the law,” Loo said.
'Starting to push'
Labor
unrest has been on the upswing in Cambodia in recent years, coinciding
with new economic growth. Cambodia’s economy grew almost 10 percent per
year between 1998 and 2008, and is expected to grow 6.7 percent in 2013,
according to the World Bank.
Just three years ago, more than half
the country’s garment workers went unsuccessfully on strike for a wage
boost to $93 a month. “Wages have been flat while the value of exports
has been rising,” says Mr. Robertson.
“Workers are starting to push for a share in the country’s productivity,” he says.
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