Photo by: Tracey Shelton
An employee sews at a local garment factory.LABOUR leaders say more than 80,000 of Cambodia’s garment workers are set to take to the streets tomorrow for a five-day strike that could be the largest the Kingdom has seen in recent memory.
The dispute follows a broader pattern of industrial turmoil that has rocked the region’s intensely competitive garment industry recently as unrelenting pressure to drive labour costs down inevitably conflicts with the demands of workers for a better minimum wage.
Pay disputes have been fought out on the garment factory floors of China, Bangladesh and Vietnam as work stoppages halt production and at times erupt into violence. With the wave of work stoppages set to hit Cambodia tomorrow, the same questions that have been faced by regional competitors will confront the Kingdom; namely, how to keep costs low and competitiveness high while at the same time providing workers with basic livelihoods.
“The win-win situation is to raise both productivity and wages,” said Chikako Oka, a fellow at the London School of Economics who has studied the Cambodian garment sector. “A trickier question is which one comes first and whether one follows the other.”…read the full story in tomorrow’s Phnom Penh Post or see the updated story online from 3PM UTC/GMT +7 hours.
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