women's work

The photo above is taken from "Women and Work in the Garment Industry," 2006, available here.

According to the World Bank, the garment industry is the main export industry here in Cambodia, representing more than 80% of total exports in 2006. The workers are mostly women from the rural areas, more than 330,000 of them, who send most of their $60-$70/month to their extended families in the provinces. The document "Women and Work in the Garment Industry," published by the World Bank, discusses findings from a study on the situation of garment workers in 2006. Garment work affects health and nutrition, breastfeeding and childcare, personal safety, and creates an environment where sexual harassment is accepted. In order to make more money, many women will work overtime, meaning that they must leave the factory in the evening to walk back to the dormitory, where the women stay because they are away from their families. The study included focus groups of women workers, 9.3% of whom had a close personal friend who had been raped in the previous year. As one woman recounts:

"One worker was raped by 3 men after she left the factory at 8:30pm. She was killed. When this problem occurred, we complained to police, but we have to spend money. Sometimes they release the doer because doer has much money. The factory took no responsibility. One more thing is that we dare not complain because we are shy/feel embarrassed." (Women & Work in the Garment Industry, p. 15)

The document also discusses how such gang rapes are usually committed against sex workers, implying that garment workers are considered low in social standing. Existing labor laws don't seem to be effective or enforced in the garment factories, for example, labor laws state that factories should provide space and one hour of paid breastfeeding time per day, yet only 30% have a nursing room.

Especially after the recent financial crisis, the Cambodian garment industry, as everywhere, has felt pressure to keep prices down, described in the Phnom Penh Post on Wednesday. Unfortunately, there is very little motivation for factory owners, mostly Chinese and Korean businessmen, to enact policies to protect these women on their own. In the Huffington Post yesterday, Jonathan Tasini (Democratic candidate for a US Senate seat from New York) reflected on the growing dissatisfaction with poor treatment of low-paid workers globally. It's clearly a complicated issue, without a clear single solution. However, as Tasini ends his article:

Where this leads is not easy to tell. It is easy to talk about worldwide solidarity - and a whole lot harder to make it happen, because of cultural and language differences, the massive physical distances between one slave-wage haven and another, the inability of the poorest to have enough resources to organize on a daily basis...a whole host of reasons.

But, it is clear-the people have had it. They cannot, and should not, put up with the siphoning of the world's wealth and resources into the hands of a few.