AFP, Phnom Penh :
After a 10-hour shift stitching clothes for western brands, Cambodian factory worker Ry Srey Bopha walks to her tiny shared room, eats leftovers, then sleeps on the floor.
Like many of Cambodia’s 650,000 garment workers, who are overwhelmingly women, Bopha’s days are monotonous and exhausting, and her diet is poor.
She rarely sees her five-year-old daughter, who is being raised by an elderly grandparent in the countryside.
“Life in the garment factories is very difficult,” she told AFP. “But I need the money so I just try to be patient.”
Once hailed as a model for sweatshop-free manufacturing, Cambodia’s booming garment sector has seen working conditions deteriorate as the number of factories has swelled. As money and orders have flooded into the industry in recent years, new factories have emerged “that either don’t know what legal requirements are… or don’t care,” said Jason Judd, a technical specialist with the International Labour Organisation’s Better Factories Cambodia programme.
“They’re not paying attention to legal compliance. They’re focused on making money,” he said.
From a violent strike in January, in which four workers died after police fired live ammunition at protesters, to repeated mass faintings on the factory floor, the once praised sector has had its reputation dented, alarming some top western brands.
But workers say that despite the publicity surrounding the protests and some nominal wage increases since, little has changed. “We’re a pitiful part of this garment industry,” Bopha said, adding that she had recently passed out on the job after inhaling fumes from chemicals used on the clothes.
