LIVING WAGES
WORK TIL YOU FAINT The giants of the sporting goods are outsourcing their production to Asia – to nations with low wages and poor working conditions. While we shop til we drop to buy their products, people in countries like Cambodia are working til they drop to make them. Welcome to the land of poverty. BY LARS ANDERSSON, TEAM TEKSTWERK She works 60 hours a week. 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. And often more – due to forced overtime. She earns 128 US dollars a month. She makes your football shirt. She is a she, because 90 percent of the 700,000 workers in Cambodia’s booming garment sector are female. Cambodia is the textile industry’s new Bangladesh – with a garment export of up to 5.7 billion US dollars in 2014. Although she had a salary increase of 28 percent on 1 January 2015, when the Cambodian state raised its minimum wage from 100 to 128 US dollars, she is still hungry and tired: “I just want a decent life for myself and my family,” she says to Sport Executive. “One or two days after payday we get healthy food. The rest of the time we get some rice and vegetables,” she continues. The president of the Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions (CATU), Yang Sophoan, notes that the garment worker’s story above is just one of many: “Life is hard for the garment workers in
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SPORT EXECUTIVE
Cambodia. Despite the raise in minimum wages you cannot feed a family. There is not enough money to cover the expenses,” she says to Sport Executive. “Therefore you have to do much more overtime than the 2 hours otherwise the maximum daily according to the Labor Law. In practice garment workers work 12-13-14 hours a day.” THEY WORK TIL THEY DROP Garment workers in Cambodia work for local employers on contracts with international textile companies such as Nike, Adidas and Puma. This is because these sporting goods industry giants are outsourcing their production to Asian nations with low wages and poor working conditions, including Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, the Philippines and Vietnam. ”The working conditions in factories supplying Adidas, Puma and Nike are not much different from the rest. Maybe a little better, but not much. For example, Adidas allows unions, so if the local employer fire a union leader, Adidas will reinstated him,”
Yang Sophoan explains. Put simply, garment workers in Cambodia do not have a good life. This is underlined in a study published in October by the International Labor Organisation’s Better Factories Cambodia project, the French Development Agency and local analysis firm Angkor Research and Consulting Ltd; 43.2 percent of the garment workers in Cambodia suffer from anaemia and 15.7 percent are underweight. Malnourishment and poor working conditions have resulted in episodes of mass fainting in the factories. The Cambodian Ministry of Labour reported 1,800 fainting incidents in 2014, which was a more than 100 percent increase from the previous year. And the Ministry of Labour claims that in the first three months of 2015 more, than 200 people have collapsed in six factories across the country. Human Rights Watch also noted in a report released in March 2015 that: “Malnutrition, due to low wages and time poverty, is endemic in Cambodia’s garment workers. This has led to a situation where workers producing high street fashion for western