PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Human Rights Watch claims that Cambodia’s apparel sector is rife with labor rights abuses, including forced excessive overtime, union discrimination and an overuse of short-term contracts.
The apparel sector is one of Cambodia’s most profitable, generating more than $5 billion each year in exports and employing up to 700,000 workers. But the sector has long been hampered by labor violations and allegations of human rights abuses, as well as frequent strikes by workers demanding a higher minimum wage.
In a report released on Thursday, New York-based HRW detailed these rampant violations after interviews with more than 340 people in the industry, including workers, government officials, union leaders and the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia.
Related Articles
“[Labor rights abuses] include overtime and retaliation against those who sought exemption from overtime, lack of rest breaks, denial of sick leave, use of underage child labor and the use of union-busting strategies to thwart independent unions,” the report, titled “Work Faster or Get Out” said, adding that women were especially vulnerable to discrimination and dismissal if they were pregnant.
You May Also Like
Cambodia’s Labor Law mandates that employees are able to work up to 60 hours a week, a schedule that is generally preferred by workers who are looking to supplement their monthly $128 income with overtime.
In interviews conducted in 48 factories, workers reported that if they sought to forgo overtime, “factory managers threatened them with contract nonrenewal or dismissal.” A worker’s refusal could also result in wage deductions.
Another threat to a workers’ job security is the excessive use of fixed duration contracts throughout the industry, HRW said, which allow a factory to employ them for three to six months.
GMAC has consistently defended the use of these short-term contracts — as opposed to contracts of undetermined duration — citing the need for flexibility in an industry where orders ebb and flow according to seasonal demands. GMAC also said that workers prefer a short-term contract since it provides a severance payment when it is terminated.
But workers told HRW that they are rarely given clear information of the differences between a fixed-duration contract and a longer-term contract when they are hired, and are usually just told to affix their thumbprint on a document signifying their consent.
“Workers pay a heavy price for that 5 percent [wage benefit] — they lose their voice and their rights,” said Chhorn Sokha, a labor rights activist from NGO Community Legal Education Center. “They are scared of making any demands of protest. They are constantly in fear that they will be fired.”
Many of the problems cited in the report could be solved if the government enforced the Labor Law. But HRW found that Ministry of Labor inspectors — lowly paid civil servants who are not provided with compensation for travel to the factories they are inspecting — are routinely offered bribes to provide a more favorable report on noncompliant factories. As a result, fines for noncompliant factories are rare given the size of the industry — only 10 received penalties between 2009 and 2013, HRW said.
Another way to solve these problems is for international brands — such as Hennes & Mauritz, Adidas, Gap and Marks and Spencer — to play a bigger role ensuring that human rights abuses are curbed in their supplier factories, the report said. The use of subcontracting factories is also problematic as workers there are more likely to be subjected to abuses due to “poor supply chain transparency.”
Acknowledging many of the report’s concerns — especially regarding the use of short-term contracts — H&M said it has started working to move their suppliers away from the “misuse of short-term contracts.”
“H&M has taken additional steps and has now formally launched stricter requirements towards our suppliers,” H&M said. “As is clear in the report, however, this is a widespread practice in the Cambodian garment industry, and for any change to be sustainable we also have to work together with other actors to affect industry-wide change.”
GMAC secretary-general Ken Loo said “nobody forces workers to sign [a fixed-duration contract].” He also took issue with the entire report, saying that it was riddled with “exceptions.”
“They use that to generalize for the whole industry and I find that unacceptable,” Loo said. “For example, relating to overtime. I acknowledge that yes, we have some members who do break the law by intimidating their workers to work more than two hours of overtime, but that is the exception rather than the norm.”
Hou Vuthy, undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Labour, said that they might use HRW’s report as a “guideline” for improvements in the industry, but he largely agreed with Loo.
“They make these individual interviews, but it is not [the reality] in general,” Vuthy said. “We do our best to do everything well, but we cannot be perfect.”