Monday 28 March 2011
By Anne Elizabeth Moore
t r u t h o u t
News Analysis
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| (Photo: Anne Elizabeth Moore) |
Bright and extremely early one Sunday morning in January, slightly more than 400 young women and a handful of young men trundled out of bed to attend class on the east side of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. (While the notion of a Christian day of rest doesn’t exist in the Buddhist country, it was their day off – for some, the only one they have for weeks.) Students sat in classes, repeated lessons back to instructors, took breaks to laugh and play in the courtyard and dreamed about their futures. It looked and felt like any college campus in the world – at least, any low-income college campus. Except that these women were learning about labor law. Because – oh yeah, did I forget to mention this? – they’re garment factory workers.
Over a series of consecutive Sundays, 500 textile laborers per day were invited to an experimental educational initiative of the International Labour Organization’s Better Factories Cambodia, held at the National Technical Training Institute on Russian Boulevard, next door to the June Textiles Company. A full day of classes, lunch, entertainment, health services, fiscal advice, job training information and free gifts were offered to more than 2,000 workers at factories around the city, all in an effort to make laborers aware of their rights under the complex Cambodian legal system.
Implementation, however, was not without drawbacks. Attendance was only 85 percent of invited participants, a problem due, in part, to the written invitation. “Many of the workers didn’t understand it,” one organizer explains.
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