Friday, February 07, 2014

The Sweat-Shop Struggle

When armed security forces opened fire on striking garment workers in Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh on Jan. 3, killing five and injuring dozens, it suddenly became clear that this was not just another protest. One month after the killings of strikers, there is still no end in sight for the crisis. As broader protests continue, the strikes of garment workers have become more politically charged.

“Workers are getting very angry,” Anannya Bhattacharjee of the New Delhi-based Asia Floor Wage Alliance, told IPS. “There is a lot of explosiveness. They do not want to tolerate the current situation of continuing poverty anymore.” Bhattacharjee said she never doubted the real motive behind what the workers are fighting for. She said strikers may have multiple reasons for protesting, including political demands for a democratic society and for fundamental human rights, but there is “a very clear economic demand here. They want a higher wage,” she said. “That’s how it all began.”

Jill Tucker, manager of ILO’s Better Factories Cambodia, a Phnom Penh-based project that monitors the garment industry in the country, said working conditions have been declining since 2010, even though not every factory is a sweatshop. As developing countries try to be competitive, wages have been set “artificially low” for a long time, unable to keep up with increasing consumer prices, Tucker told IPS. And unlike other garment-producing countries where factories are not concentrated in big cities, Cambodia only has one main manufacturing hub: its capital city. Workers as a result have to pay very high living costs to stay near where they work.

According to Liana Foxvog, communications director of the Washington-based International Labour Rights Forum over the past two decades, multinationals have spread their supply chains around the world, driving a “race to the bottom” among developing countries.
“We have seen low wages, repression of freedom of association as well as poor working conditions,” Foxvog said. “We need a system that is different from the current business-as-usual model where brands and retailers will shop around to different factories and say who will make this shirt for two dollars. If a factory won’t, they can find a factory that will. As a result we still have a sweatshop economy in 2014.” She said “We need workers to once and for all have a fair living wage and will no longer have to face hunger and mass fainting. We know companies can pay more.”

The U.N. International Labour Organisation said it was “deeply disturbed” by the continuing violence in Cambodia. The agency also reiterated its earlier call for the government to launch an independent inquiry into the repression of strikers.

Cambodia’s economy is dependent on the garment industry, which employs half a million workers and accounts for almost all of the nation’s exports. According to the ILO, the country just topped five billion dollars worth of garment exports last year for the first time. The country of 7.1 million people has a per capita income rate of 880 dollars. That compares to Hong Kong’s 36,560 dollars, according to World Bank data.

While ILO’s Tucker explains that “The current system of consumers owning cheap, disposable clothes in very high volume cannot sustain itself economically or environmentally. We have maybe 10 years left of cheap clothing.” Professor Benjamin Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, meanwhile insists that consumers should not feel guilty when they buy low-cost products made in developing countries. The term “sweatshop”, he argues, has negative connotations even though it is sometimes the best available opportunity to workers, which can lead to economic development and, at the end, better wages and working conditions.

For more information read the article in this months Socialist Standard

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