DARK, NARROW STAIRS lead up to the offices of the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTU). The country’s largest federation of garment workers, it has more than sixty thousand members, most of them women. The long room is lined with metal filing cabinets flanking a scarred wooden conference table. The only English words in the room are on a wall banner that says: “Social Justice Is the Foundation of Peace.”
There are no lights on. The atmosphere is murky. Immediately to the right of the door are video monitors that show the stairs, the office, and the streets below. Why would a labor union office have surveillance cameras? Chea Mony, a slight, dark man with abundant hair, a soft, high voice, and a worried face, says he is not paranoid. In his life, state violence has been very real.
“Government people come here often to investigate us or observe us. In case there are any ‘accidents,’ we have evidence to reconstruct and document what happened. And we will have video to show who committed the crime.”1
Three officers in Chea Mony’s union have been assassinated—two in front of factories where they were organizing, one on a busy boulevard in the middle of Phnom Penh. One of them was his brother. Thirty-seven members of his union have been imprisoned. Chea Mony faces six federal charges. He could be arrested without warning.
On his forehead the veteran organizer wears a jagged diagonal scar that extends from his hairline across his forehead. He has been beaten by police clubs and rock-wielding company guards. He describes the men who beat him as goons; the English word jumps out from his long Khmer sentences. The goons, he says, were sometimes hired by garment manufacturers, other times by the government.
Every year on January 22, Chea Mony ignores warnings from the ruling Cambodian People’s Party and leads a march by union workers to the site where his brother, Chea Vichea, was gunned down on a busy Phnom Penh street in 2004. Chea Vichea was a cofounder of the Free Trade Union and of the Cambodian National Rescue Party, fierce opponents of the ruling Hun Sen regime. CNRP was deeply involved in the December 2013–January 2014 garment worker protests. Their prominence was one reason the government unleashed violence.
Educated in the Soviet Union in the bracing atmosphere of 1980s “Perestroika,” (reconstruction), Chea Vichea was one of the most important early leaders of a Cambodian garment workers’ movement that is admired worldwide for its courage. As he bought his morning paper on January 22, 2004, Vichea was shot in the head and chest by unmasked men on motorcycles. Six months later, Mony left his job teaching chemistry at the University of Phnom Penh to take over as president of the union his brother had founded. Between them, the brothers Chea ran the Free Trade Union for twenty years.
The Chea brothers are not uncontroversial in Phnom Penh. Some objected to middle-class intellectuals leading a working-class movement. Others believed, and continue to, that garment union leaders should stay out of party politics. They feel that garment workers cannot afford to lose the support of Hun Sen’s government. Finally, since most of Cambodia’s 750,000 garment workers are female, many believe that its garment unions should be run by women.
Despite all this, Chea Mony has long stood as a symbol of resistance to factory owners and the repressive ruling party. And he is admired for that. Under his leadership, the minimum wage for garment workers grew fivefold. And he is beloved by shop-floor activists, many of whom he has mentored. In 2016, a woman was finally elected to lead the FTU. Fifty-three-year-old Touch Seou rose from the shop floor under the tutelage of Chea Mony.
On a hot November afternoon, Chea Mony leans his forehead against his hand. Thoughtfully he lays out his goals for Cambodian workers: decent wages, full legal enforcement of Cambodian labor laws, freedom of association, and government reform to ensure transparency and democracy. Though garment workers’ wages have gone up steadily, he admits, his larger goals—respect, freedom of speech and assembly, and labor law reform—remain unfulfilled.
Chea Mony and other members of the FTU have survived horrific violence. At a minimum wage rally in 1997, someone threw four grenades into the crowd, killing sixteen and wounding more than a hundred, including an official of the US Republican Party. (An FBI investigation found that the grenades were likely thrown by Hun Sen’s bodyguards.) Sixteen years later, in January 2014, FTU members were among the protesters killed and wounded when police shot into the crowd.
“We are willing to risk our lives for the worker,” Chea Mony says softly and without bombast. “After the Pol Pot regime, we need a good life, a truly democratic society. We deserve that. We’ve earned it. I don’t see that violence has or ever can stop our workers from joining strikes and demonstrations. I have never seen our workers afraid.”
Wim Conklin, Solidarity Center director in Phnom Penh, says he is in awe of the courage of Cambodian garment workers. Conklin has worked in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Myanmar. He met brave labor activists in all those places, he says. “But there is something different about the Cambodians. I have watched them stand their ground facing an employer who they know has a gun in his desk. They don’t flinch. They don’t give way.”2
That is certainly true of Ath Thorn, the robust, gregarious former garment worker who leads the Cambodian Coalition of Apparel Workers Democratic Union (CCAWDU), a progressive federation with over fifty thousand members. Thorn has a scar on his forehead that looks just like the one Chea Mony has. Thorn got his back in 1999 when he was a shop-floor worker and grassroots organizer.
“We were educating workers and advocating with bosses to improve working conditions,” he says. “We won an agreement at the bargaining table.” Thorn thought he had negotiated a clean victory. “When we finished, we came out to find guys holding big rocks. They hit me in the head.” Thorn shows a deep scar that runs from his scalp line to the middle of his forehead. He points it out as a badge of pride, a combat ribbon in the war for workers’ rights.
They couldn’t frighten him, Thorn says, so government and business leaders tried another tack. In 2006, they offered him a $750,000 bribe if he would quiet his union, stop making so much noise and so much trouble. Global corporations and their government allies bribe labor leaders around the world to try to subvert militant unions, he says. Thorn calls these men “yellow.” He shakes his head in disgust.
It is dangerous to say no to a bribe in Cambodia, but Thorn did. “They tried to buy me, but they can’t,” he says. “So they tried to kill me. Gangsters on motorbikes began chasing me, shooting. I lived only because I was lucky. When they almost had me, I was able to hop on a ferry and cross the river. They missed the boat so I lived. Another minute—I would have died.”3
Ath Thorn agrees with Chea Mony that the relentless violence directed against Cambodian labor activists has only strengthened their resolve. “Workers understand that employers and the government collaborate to hurt the worker so they need to stand together. The violence and repression makes them become more militant. They’re committed to the growth of the labor movement precisely because employers and some people in government use gangsters to attack any worker who is willing to form a union. They will not be made fools.”
CCAWDU’s membership is 95 percent female and its members combat violence against women by employers and government, by police, and by men they know—in the workplace and at home. Collectively, the members of CCAWDU won the 2012 Arthur Svensson International Prize, an honor given those who do the most each year to promote workers’ rights. They used the $80,000 prize to upgrade their building. It was a good investment, they say.
On the day I visited, there were local union meetings under way, counseling sessions for laid-off workers, and healthcare referrals. Thorn’s office is in an open loft visible to everyone who comes in. The Svensson prize hangs in a glass box over the main room. The bright Phnom Penh sun glints off it and casts rainbow light on floors and walls, and on the green and white signs showing silhouettes of pregnant women. These signs explain to workers that women have a right to paid maternity leave with no loss of seniority.
The union supports the programs of United Sisterhood Alliance, the Messenger Band, and the Worker Information Centers. Thorn is conscious that his constituents are mostly women; he does his best to be a feminist labor leader. Though 85 percent of Cambodian garment workers are women, there are few women union leaders.
Yang Sophorn, president of the Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions, is one of the few. A veteran of the garment shop floor, she now leads an alliance of garment workers, teachers, and construction workers. Late for a meeting, she speeds to her office, a long narrow room squeezed above a Phnom Penh alleyway. She rides a motorcycle, wears a black leather jacket and a black helmet bearing a white sticker with a green fist that says “$177.” That was the wage she was fighting for in 2015.
When Yang takes off her helmet, her hair rides up to reveal the same jagged white line on her forehead. Yang has been beaten many times. It never mattered that she is a woman, she says. That never stopped the violence, against her or anyone else.4
Yang rose in the labor movement because she came to the attention of Chea Vichea and because everyone admired her fierceness. A highly successful piece worker, Yang made more money than most, because she could sew so fast and well. But when her employer offered to make her shop supervisor, she refused. “People who get that position become part of the oppression,” she said. “And my dream was to make things better.”
In 1999, Yang helped organize Cambodia’s first nationwide minimum wage protests. Afterward, she led a negotiating team that won workers at her factory extra money for daily meals, an end to mandatory overtime, time-and-a-half pay for additional work hours, and maternity leave. The national movement was still trying to achieve those goals seventeen years later.
As a rare woman union leader, Yang began to attract attention both from men in the labor movement and from leaders in business and government. Not all of it was welcome. One day in the early 2000s, she says, armed men came up behind her, pinioned her arms, and started to drag her out of her factory.
Furious, she whispered to them: “‘You decide who you want trouble with. If you don’t do this, I suppose you will have trouble with your boss. But I promise you, if you do this, you will have trouble from me.’ They said, ‘We’re sorry. We have to do this because we are afraid of the owner.’ I walked to the front of the factory and told the workers what was happening. They stopped work and walked out with me.”
Yang’s removal sparked a month-long strike, after which she negotiated wage increases, safety improvements, and reinstatement of all who had been fired. At age thirty, she was elected president of the ten-thousand-member Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions. By 2016, she led a large union federation.
Yang’s militancy has been her calling card. She believes that strikes are the best way to reduce violence, that workers must not be afraid to wield the only weapon they have. To stop the roaring rivers of fast fashion slows the flow of profits. That gets noticed.
In 2016, the National Assembly of Cambodia passed a law limiting the right to strike or even protest and making it more difficult to legally register a union. Bangladesh did the same. As garment worker protest built around the world, similar labor restrictions were proposed or passed in India, the Philippines, Mexico, Turkey, and elsewhere. While the Cambodian National Assembly debated the new trade union law, Yang called for a nationwide general strike to demonstrate worker power. The call fizzled. After the violent crackdowns in 2014, workers were too afraid.
But a similar call went out in India to protest proposed restrictive new labor laws. And on Labor Day 2016, close to 150 million workers struck across India. It was the largest strike in history, a high-water mark of twenty-first-century global labor unrest. If the new labor movement has not yet built lasting institutions, it has clearly demonstrated its ability to organize mass protest.
In Cambodia, Yang complains, union leaders are too divided and too scared to mount that kind of action. “If workers strike or don’t strike depends on the union leaders themselves,” she says. “If union leaders explain in detail the important issues that workers are facing, like losing their rights and freedom when the new union law is implemented, workers will strike.”
Still, Yang’s own experiences underline the rationality of Cambodian workers’ caution. She was badly beaten by police in April 2016 protesting outside the national legislature. “We have no confidence in this government,” she responded angrily. “The protest was peaceful. It did not even cause a traffic jam. So why did they do this to us?”
When Yang is not organizing marches to hold the Cambodian Labor Department accountable, she has begun—like Kalpona Akter—to tour the places where affluent consumers live and shop. In the spring of 2017, Yang spoke at US college campuses and to union groups, then addressed the UN Conference on the Status of Women. She also led protests against Nike, her former employer.
Yang insists that the sneaker giant has gone too long without paying a living wage or allowing independent inspections of its factories. She encouraged United Students Against Sweatshops to apply pressure on their campuses for universities to suspend contracts with Nike until they do. Yang has revived the slogan “Just Don’t Do It.” Just don’t do business with Nike until the company reforms. From Cornell to the University of Washington, she was greeted by students who promised to carry on that struggle.
On the 2017 anniversary of the Triangle Fire, Yang helped a group of students shut down Chicago’s largest Nike store. “What is so crazy and saddening and shocking to me,” Yang said, “is to go into stores like Nike and see that the price tag of one sneaker is almost equal to one month’s salary for a woman worker, when she must produce hundreds and thousands of sneakers a month. And when they ask for higher wages, say $10 or a chair, or just better working conditions, they face abuse, threats, and restrictions.”
Yang encourages low-wage workers and their allies to keep their eyes on history. “It is a long struggle and workers get tired. They cannot always fight. They feel despair.” But they always revive again.
When Yang was beaten by “a group of gangsters, probably organized by the Ministry of Labor, the workers came to help me. They struggled with the gangsters.” She looks intensely across her cluttered office table. “Workers will rise up. They will organize. They will strike—if they know what they are striking for.” Then she is off to another meeting. She raises her fist, bows, and heads off on her motorcycle into the crowded city center.