Garment Workers Still Camping Outside Factory 6 Months After Closure

VOD, Oct. 28, 2020

At age 48, Morm Chanthou says garment factories won’t hire her anymore. She worked for 16 years at Dignity Knitter in Kandal province until the factory began failing to pay workers in December. It then laid off 1,000 employees.

In January, workers say they saw the company start to take equipment out of the factory despite owing the workers money. So on the 13th of that month, they started camping outside the factory all day and night on a rotation to prevent the factory owners from selling equipment, and leaving them in the lurch.

It’s been 289 days since then. Chanthou still shows up at least once a week for her shift keeping watch on the factory, which closed earlier this year without paying out its workers.

“Our age is too old and our eyes can’t see clearly enough,” she says. “So nobody wants to hire us. We are old.”

Sour Socheat, 40, faces similar difficulties. “We served in the garment sector for more than 20 years, but we’ve ended up with nothing in hand except the last hurtful memory,” Socheat says.

“I’m like a floating plant just drifting around,” she says. “I can’t go forward or backward.”

In full: https://vodenglish.news/garment-workers-still-camping-outside-factory-6-months-after-closure/