IT’S SUNDAY AFTERNOON and Sok Thareth has called ahead to a United Sisterhood Alliance Worker Information Center to say that I will be coming to listen to their discussion. The Worker Information Center lies deep inside one of the half-hidden garment worker neighborhoods that ring Phnom Penh. We are driving out on Vathanak Serry Sim’s motorcycle.
Sok explains the purpose of garment worker discussion groups. “We try to promote women’s leadership. We want women to take over unions and workplaces. And we want them at the policy level, in government to make the decisions that affect women garment workers’ lives.”
Sundays are relatively quiet in downtown Phnom Penh—a stark contrast to the weekday chaos when a sea of motorcycles, open-air cabs known as tuk-tuks, and a few expensive cars choke the city’s streets. They converge in chaotic mayhem on crossroads and grand traffic circles that seem to have no streetlights and no rules. It is said that Phnom Penh has three bus lines. But, as in many booming Global South cities, public transport is hard to find.
The city is crowded, polluted, and elegant in a gritty way—a mix of Buddhist temples, French colonial buildings and their modern variants, and gated garment factories set back from broad ceremonial avenues. Entire families pile onto motorcycles. Children without helmets stand between their parents, bracing themselves against potholes by placing their hands on adults’ shoulders.
When shifts begin and end, women workers jam into open-air trucks for brief, dangerous rides. Many wear white surgical masks to screen out toxic fumes, protecting their faces from the dust and stones that fly up off the road. There are no seats, no seat belts, and accidents are common. When drivers jam on the brakes, workers are thrown to the road, scraping skin off, breaking bones, sometimes dying.
With rural Cambodians being pushed off their lands by government concessions to logging, rubber, and sugar companies, there has been a rapid population shift from the countryside to the city. Between 2000 and 2015, Phnom Penh doubled in population, from nine hundred thousand to a sprawling boomtown of two million, home to one in eight of the country’s citizens.
A big part of the city’s growth has been in garment factory districts. Alongside gated factories rise gleaming glass and steel buildings that would not look out of place in Los Angeles. These are homes and offices for the factory managers sent by foreign companies to run the Cambodian garment industry. They come from China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and the United States. In these districts, you see signs in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and English as often as in Khmer. Meanwhile, says Sok, Cambodian college graduates have a hard time finding work.
From the back of Vathanak’s maroon motorcycle, the Sunday ride to the drop-in center is a little hair-raising. He points his bike into oncoming traffic, speeds through shortcuts and around sharp curves. No one looks twice. We ride a long way from ceremonial Phnom Penh: the confluence of the Tonlé Sap and Mekong Rivers, the Royal Palace, and national government offices. The road grows rougher, the buildings lower, trees fewer, potholes everywhere, filled with muddy water.
It is difficult to find the address we’ve been given. We ride up and down dirt alleyways between crowded apartment buildings. There are food vendors, smells of grilling meat, skinny stray cats. Vathanak is used to searching out the hidden refuges of his city’s labor movement. Fluent in English and Khmer, adept in French, Chinese, and a smattering of other languages, he is the resource officer at Cambodia’s Solidarity Center, nexus of the country’s myriad and fragmented labor unions. He is also a child survivor of the Khmer Rouge death camps.
Vathanak’s parents were from families well known for their mastery of traditional Cambodian music. They are among only a few artists to have survived the Khmer Rouge genocide. “It’s because my father was the best fisherman in our camp,” he says. “He was able to feed everyone. Plus, he and my mother entertained the guards, so they let them live.” He swallows. “We were just lucky.”
A toddler during the war years, Vathanak doesn’t remember much. “And I don’t like to ask my mother,” he says. “She doesn’t like to talk about it. She worries she might burden me.” Most Cambodians are very young. The Khmer Rouge killed two million people between 1975 and 1979. And they continued killing civilians in some parts of the country, with the acquiescence of the US and the Chinese governments, into the late 1990s. Young people don’t like to talk about it, says Vun Em. “We didn’t live through what our parents did. It’s their story, not ours.”1
Suddenly, Vathanak points and my mind jumps back to the present. There is a tight cluster of women and girls in an open doorway, waving at us. “I guess this is the place,” he says, turning off his engine. The young women lead us into a long, sunlit room where twenty garment workers sit in a circle on the floor. They are talking as we enter.
The walls are lined with hand-drawn diagrams of women’s reproductive organs and the stages of gestation. There is a poster from the “Beautiful Clothes, Ugly Reality” fashion show. Some placards explain workers’ rights under Cambodian law. Others describe the ILO workers’ rights conventions that Cambodia has ratified.
Though they work six days a week, the women seem excited to be here. “Our work,” says drop-in center coordinator Sok Thareth, is to “try to draw each worker from her rented room one afternoon a week to have a little enjoyment.” There are eight drop-in centers around Phnom Penh run by United Sisterhood Alliance. Each has a paid facilitator. Dina runs the show here. She is a former garment worker who came to the attention of United Sisterhood when she led a successful campaign to win workers back pay from a “runaway” garment factory owner.2
Advocating for workers whose factories have fled is a specialty of United Sisterhood. They visit workers’ homes, bring food and clothing, and help workers plan campaigns to get what they are owed. United Sisterhood tries to cultivate leaders from every factory, says Sok. Each brings other workers into the movement.
On the day I attended, the discussion group was packed and highly animated. “We have outreach activities at night and on Sundays,” Sok explains. “Organizers go to the factories when workers are leaving, usually around 6 p.m. We try to engage the women to feel comfortable speaking out. Sometimes the organizer invites a worker to eat with her. At first, most workers are scared. We have to build trust. Sometimes it takes ten times of our organizers visiting before a worker will come to our center. It’s challenging.”
The workers are at first attracted by survival aid, Sok says—food, clothing, medicine. But United Sisterhood organizers offer much more. They help workers file sexual-harassment suits, help with child custody and domestic violence cases too. “The drop-in center is for workers who want to study, to learn about labor law and workers’ rights,” says Sok. “But we also help a worker with her problems—in the factory, or in the family.”
United Sisterhood offers job and business training too. “Some of the women are highly skilled seamstresses who dream of opening small businesses,” Sok says. United Sisterhood has helped a few women get started. Their businesses are models “that help others to dream.”
Worker Information Centers are training grounds for new leaders and new strategies, says Vun Em. The Messenger Band got its start at one. Womyn’s Agenda for Change founder Rosanna Barbero was leading a group that Vun was part of. “We were shy,” Vun recalls. “Women didn’t feel like they could speak. So Rosanna had us sing and that was easier.” Soon Vun was interviewing garment workers and turning their stories into songs and plays. Now she is helping women “talk about domestic violence, violence against women, dropping out of school. We are part of the global Safe Cities for Women movement, so we perform our pieces in the streets during Safe Cities actions.”
Dina says that issues of reproductive health and justice are also very compelling for women at her center. Workers want to know how to avoid getting pregnant, how to care for themselves while nursing, how to treat infections. Sitting for so many hours, garment workers get urinary tract infections, yeast infections, hemorrhoids, and repetitive stress injuries.
Since hospitals have been privatized in Cambodia, doctors are too expensive for most workers. So the center offers an herbal medicine course, says Dina, “how to cure reproductive organ problems with traditional Cambodian medicine. And we have the herbs right there we can give them.” She also shows women what plants treat illnesses and where to find them.
Vun Em gathers leaves in the countryside that can be boiled into tea to treat fevers. The drop-in centers distribute those leaves when workers’ children are sick. Dina also has leaves workers can soak in to calm skin infections and relieve aches. Few workers have access to bathtubs, but they still enjoy soaking in plastic or metal laundry tubs.
For mental health, United Sisterhood developed “what we call the Happy Happy program.” They throw parties. The women “cook and eat together; they drink and have music—mini concerts or dances.” They are lonely and isolated, far from family and friends in their villages, Sok says. Workers need community before they can stand up for themselves.
Finally, drop-in centers teach workers to understand global supply chains, says Sok. “We show them, this is the profit of Puma, Adidas, Walmart. This is what CEOs earn in a year. We take workers to other countries when we can, to meet people who make clothes there for the same companies. We take them window shopping to see the clothes and shoes they make. They learn what those cost in stores overseas compared to how much they make for sewing each item. They feel so hurt.” But next come anger and ideas about how to bring change.
After a few weeks of Sunday afternoon discussions, the women in Dina’s group are quite willing to engage with Vathanak and me. Sitting or crouching in a circle on the floor, they raise their hands. One after the other, they shout suggestions for making garment work safe and just.
“We propose that all of the brands, but especially Walmart, give us more wages because we cannot buy adequate, nutritious food for our families on what they pay us,” one woman says firmly. “I propose that the brands must send someone down to each of their factories to check on conditions,” says another. “You have a responsibility to enforce your code of conduct at the factories where you source your clothes. The suppliers violate our rights. We would like the brands to monitor compliance directly, with actual people coming to the shops.”
Others wanted to speak to consumers: “I propose that consumers should not just buy clothes but they should ask, ‘Are these clean clothes or not clean clothes?’ You need to see the work behind the thing you buy. Is it a sweatshop behind your clothes? Let consumers check for that. That is how they can help us.”
Dina has taught these women that the brands get 90 percent of the profits for every piece of clothing. The factory owners get 9 percent. Workers get just 1 percent. One woman raises her hand. “I would like to propose to the international brands that they take care of the worker by giving us $1 for every shirt, every pair of pants we make.” Approving murmurs. “Do you all agree?” Dina asks. Everyone nods. Children at the outer edges of the circle look up from their toys and laugh.
At a similar gathering on the other side of the city, three local union presidents—Dany, Danu, and Sreypon*—tell me that, in their factories, pregnancy leave is the biggest concern of workers. Cambodian law mandates employer-paid maternity leave, says Dany, but “the employers don’t give it. We help workers learn how to negotiate with the boss. And when they win they feel powerful. They have helped themselves.”3
Sreypon’s factory has seen mass faintings. They are endemic in Cambodia. “There were many cases of fainting,” she says, “because the plant was narrow and hot, and the fabrics smelled bad. So did the glue for putting together sneakers.” But Sreypon does not believe the fainting was a result only of exposure to toxic fumes. “There’s too much overtime and not enough food,” she says.
Like the workers of Bangladesh, these activists are beginning to organize around calories rather than wages: how many calories a worker can buy on what she earns. “Workers know from the 2012 ILO report that everyone needs two thousand calories a day,” says union president Roth Minea. “In Phnom Penh, many can only afford around a hundred and fifty calories after they send money home and pay rent and water and electricity.”
This is a problem that vexes garment workers around the world. So they are working through the ILO and UNI Global Union to enact global standards. Every human needs two thousand calories a day. “Everyone needs fresh air and water every day,” says Sreypon. “Please tell the brands this,” she says with a warm, broad smile. “Please tell consumers.” Then she fits a gold motorcycle helmet over her long hair, straddles a purple motorcycle, and speeds off for an organizing meeting at a nearby garment worker dormitory.
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*For worker safety, using first names only.