When You Build a Small Roof for the Dog

By JULIA WALLACE – NYT May 23, 2013

Morning shift workers arrive at a factory in Phnom Penh.Thomas Cristofoletti for The New York Times

After an overloaded mezzanine collapsed at the Wing Star Shoes Factory on the southern outskirts of Phnom Penh last week, killing two workers and injuring 11 others, the Cambodian government sprang into action.

One of the prime minister’s sons was dispatched to bring cash gifts to the victims’ families. The social affairs minister rushed to the scene and gave a press conference promising additional compensation. He also announced that from now on the government would conduct safety inspections in factories across the country.

This swift reaction underscores the government’s interest in maintaining stability in the garment sector, which is still the broadest pillar of Cambodia’s economy nearly 20 years after the country opened up to market reforms. But that shouldn’t obscure its more typical response to the grievances of garment workers: its systematic effort to severely curtail their attempts to unionize.

In the wake of the Rana Plaza’s collapse in Bangladesh last month, some commentators have written off the Wing Star Shoes incident as an unfortunate anomaly and are holding up Cambodia’s garment sector as an example of best manufacturing practices in a developing country. This is true only to a limited extent.

In the late 1990s, after the United States granted Cambodia access to its markets on the condition that it improve labor standards, Cambodia put into place a comprehensive and relatively progressive labor law, and the International Labor Organization created a program, now known as Better Factories, to monitor compliance. With that, Cambodia developed a reputation as a good-guy manufacturer, a significant competitive advantage for a country saddled by corruption and with higher electricity and transport prices than its neighbors.

But when a set of international trade quotas ended in 2005, Better Factories was effectively neutered. Its reports have since become far less transparent; they no longer mention by name the factories that fail to improve poor safety practices or even reveal which factories the monitoring group visited to gather data.

The Cambodian Labor Law, while still good on paper, is frequently violated or goes unenforced. Factory owners routinely hire on short-term contracts, which allows them to reduce benefits to workers while holding the threat of non-renewal over their heads, forcing them to work multiple overtime shifts and dissuading them from joining independent unions.

Workers are, of course, welcome to join one of the many government- or management-affiliated unions that have proliferated in recent years. For an estimated garment workforce of 350,000, there are now some 600 unions, but only a small fraction could be considered independent. Pro-government and pro-factory unions take up a majority of the seats allotted to labor on the national tripartite committee that negotiates minimum-wage increases. Their dominance considerably complicates collective-bargaining efforts for other unions.

And then there is violence. In 2004, the dynamic young leader of the Free Trade Union, Chea Vichea, was killed in a drive-by shooting as he sat reading his morning paper. A few months later, another prominent union leader was killed in a similar fashion. And so was a third in 2007. Last year, the well-connected governor of Bavet, a town on the Vietnamese border, fired his gun into a crowd of protesting garment workers and badly injured three women. Although he has admitted to the shooting, he has still not been taken into custody. His trial was due to begin on Monday but was postponed because he did not show up.

Cambodia’s workers have nonetheless scored some successes — notably, a 25 percent wage hike in March, obtained after months of negotiations. But it’s probably no coincidence that the concession came so soon before national elections in July: Prime Minister Hun Sen immediately stepped forward to take credit for it.

And so Wing Star Shoes, far from being an anomaly, is emblematic of working conditions in manufacturing plants throughout Cambodia. Its male workers are on fixed-term contracts, and all its workers risk dismissal if they refuse to work overtime on three occasions. The factory has at least five competing unions, only one of which, the Collective Union Movement of Workers, is independent.

After last week’s accident, that union’s leader, Pav Sina, argued strenuously against reopening the factory until it had been checked by independent inspectors for other structural flaws. Nobody backed him up. “Workers are now terrified of going back to work,” he told me last weekend. Yet Wing Star Shoes’s 8,000 employees were ordered back on the floor on Monday. Shortly afterward, an electrical short-circuit sparked a panic and a small stampede; 20 workers fainted and were hospitalized.

Van Sou Ieng, the head of the national manufacturers’ association, defended management’s decision. “Just like in a house, when you build a small roof for the dog,” he told journalists, “if that small roof collapses, you will not suggest that the whole house is going to collapse.”

Julia Wallace is managing editor of The Cambodia Daily.