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Garment workers returning after a lunch break. (Photo: Anne Elizabeth Moore / t r u t h o u t)By Anne Elizabeth Moore, t r u t h o u t Report
Meet the international working class - the faceless laborers that likely had a hand in stitching together your mid-range jeans, your jaunty parka or your favorite silky smooth T-shirt: They are super giggly and sharing snacks in the back of a converted military pickup truck over their lunch break.
In fact, they're downright cute as buttons, and make about that, too. Cambodia offers a national monthly minimum wage for garment workers of $50. This is still higher than in some countries, but Cambodia's economic boom means that prices and wages in almost all other sectors have risen rapidly in recent years. In 2009, the Cambodian Labour Union Federation and the National Institute of Statistics determined that the minimum wage to support the conditions factory workers lived under was $93 per month. Yet, recent talks to grant laborers a living wage stalled immediately.
"It is too much money to consider when the economic crisis has affected the sector," the president of the Free Trade Union of Workers Chea Mony admitted to the press mast month. Ninety-three garment factories closed and 60 suspended work in 2009, leaving 68,190 workers - close to 20 percent of the force at last tally - out of jobs, according to official Ministry of Labour records. Many women, with few other opportunities in the developing nation, took jobs as sex workers. The so-called entertainment industry grew rapidly, and some fear HIV transmission rates are on the rise too.
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