Common transportation means for garment workers

The Cambodian garment industry employs over 300,000 workers. Most of them are young women from rural areas accounted for about 90% of the workforce.

Cambodia still have limited public transportation means. The main buses mainly provide services to the major provincial towns. There is a few percentage of them who own private transportation. What most of them who live far away from the factory precise is the joint monthly-rented truck like the one illustrated in this photo. Those who live along the run way of the truck will take part in this standing seat on the truck. They commune every they between their villages and the factory which is located about 30 to 50 kilometres to work for 8 hours per day and sometime they need to stay to work overtime until 6 pm or 8 pm based on the urgent

need of the enterprises or factories.

[Photo by Chea Sophal]

This is the other common transportation method which is called Romork (motorbike with a trailer) to carry people as many as 20 to 30 people. The workers use this since it is a low cost and they cannot afford the other transportation mean. This is sometime too dangerous to travel since the news articles usually reported on the traffic accidents in which Romork was involved and workers got serious injuries and sometime even resulting in casualties.

(Photo by Chea Sophal

The other implications of this joint travel is that upon their return to work after 3-month maternity leave, the new mother would definitely choose either to continue to work for quit the current job and find other vacancies when they regained their strength and power after their extended maternity leave. If they come to work, they place the time management of delivering breastfeeding their baby since they could not leave 30-minute earlier or later. This is because they have the same transportation means. They cannot go alone.