Women in Cambodia’s garments sector work 10-12 hours a day. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
PHNOM PENH, May 31 2014 (IPS)

The movement for reproductive justice sees women’s decision to have – or not have – children as a fundamental right. Should they choose to bear a child, women should have the right to care and provide for them; if they opt not to give birth, family planning services should be made available to enable women to space or prevent pregnancies.

In Cambodia, where women make up 60 percent of the population of 14 million people, this fundamental right is being trampled by insecure labour contracts, toxic working conditions and a near-total absence of maternity benefits for working mothers.

Take Cambodia’s garments industry, a massive sector that accounts for 80 percent of the country’s exports. A full 90 percent of the workforce is female, but labour rights have not accompanied employment opportunities.

"[The] lack of labour rights for women [is] a worrying trend that is completely changing the culture of Cambodia.” -- Tola Moeun, head of the labour programme at the Community Legal Education Centre
Ever since the country entered into a liberalising agreement with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2005, long-term contracts have been edged out in favour of short term or fixed duration contracts (FDCs), the latter being far more popular among East Asian factory owners and western clothing brands like Gap, Walmart and H&M.

These informal arrangements “abuse garment workers’ reproductive rights,” Sophea Chrek, a former garment worker and technical assistant to the Workers Information Center (WIC) – which recently staged a fashion show to highlight the issue – told IPS.

“Women employed under FDCs for three to six months, or sometimes even one month, will not risk their job by having a baby. Usually, they choose to have an abortion…before the contract ends to ensure that the line leaders or supervisors are not aware of their pregnancy,” Chrek added.

According to Cambodian labour law, factories are supposed to provide maternity leave, but most get around this requirement with short contracts, which leave the estimated 600,000 workers vulnerable to employers’ whims.

Melissa Cockroft, a technical advisor on sexual and reproductive health, tells IPS that women without access to family planning services resort to unsafe and unregulated measures, such as using over-the-counter Chinese products to induce abortions.

These methods can be fatal, but women seem hesitant to avail themselves of NGO-provided free or discounted service at on-site infirmaries, which are less confidential.

Sometimes their grueling schedules, which include 10 to 12-hour workdays with only a short lunch break in between, keep them from making appointments. Many of these women, Cockroft says, are just too busy to even think of starting families.

Garment workers’ reticence to use reproductive services can be cultural too, as talking about sexual health is considered ‘shameful’ in traditional Cambodian society.

Cambodian law also stipulates that factories provide working mothers with childcare, but Cockroft says she has only seen one operational childcare facility during all her years as an advocate in the field.

For some women, the decision to leave their children at home emerges from a desire to spare them the grueling commute – many factory workers travel shoulder-to-shoulder in trucks or on compact wagons pulled by tuk tuks, ubiquitous motorcycle taxis, down Cambodia’s notoriously unsafe roads.

Very often, babies remain at home with their grandmothers in the countryside while their mothers go off to work in the city, where they earn roughly 100 dollars per month. Union leaders are trying to raise this minimum wage to 160 dollars.

In general, though, both Cockroft and Chrek say garment workers consider themselves “too poor” to have children.

Entertainers and street workers

Meanwhile, in Cambodia’s popular entertainment sector, women face a unique set of challenges, their access to reproductive health services hindered by the informal and unpredictable nature of their work.

Independent researcher Dr. Ian Lubek tells IPS that entertainment workers are likely to experience a much higher risk of foetal alcoholic syndrome due to the number of beverages they are forced to consume every night in order to get tips from their customers. Research from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) suggests that a female beer seller or hostess consumes up to 11 drinks a night.

Years of advocacy efforts have at least enabled entertainers working for international beer companies to secure better wages, with women employed by the Cambrew brewery now drawing a salary of close to 160 dollars a month.

Higher wages, according to Phal Sophea, former beer seller and representative for the Siem Reap division of the Cambodia Food and Service Workers Federation (CFSWF), amounts to less economic pressure to have transactional sex.

“I think better pay will reduce sex work because the [women] generally go out with customers when the pay is too low,” she told IPS.

Of all the groups of working women struggling to raise children, street-based sex workers are among the most marginalised and are often subject to police violence, arrests and forced detention in anti-trafficking ‘reeducation centres’.

While unions for entertainment workers can negotiate contracts, sex workers are left completely vulnerable to the laws of the streets.

Labour research indicates that Cambodians living in urban areas require, at the very least, 150 dollars a month in order to survive; most salaries are set below 100 a month, making it very difficult for the average working Cambodian to make ends meet, and feed their families. As it is, 40 percent of Cambodian children are chronically malnourished.

WNU Board Member Socheata Sim explained that sex work might be the only option for the many women without a formal education; according to a report on education levels among women in Cambodia, only one-third of school-aged girls are enrolled at the lower secondary school level, and one in ten at the upper secondary school level.

Many sex workers want a better life for their children, but few can afford the high fees, bribes and related costs of formal schooling.

Furthermore, sex workers living in slum dwellings face a constant threat of eviction. Tola Moeun, head of the labour programme at the Community Legal Education Centre, told IPS that high rates of evictions are now forcing many women to migrate abroad in search of employment.

“Yet once abroad, if undocumented, migrant workers find they do not have the rights citizens have,” he lamented.

In Thailand, for instance, where tens of thousands of Cambodian women now live and work, undocumented workers are fired from their jobs if they become pregnant, are denied maternity leave and earn half the 300-baht (nine-dollar) daily minimum wage.

Tola sees the “lack of labour rights for women as a worrying trend that is completely changing the culture of Cambodia.”

(END)

Garment worker at a Bangladesh factory. Credit: B A Sujan/Map/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY, May 25 2013 (IPS)

Australia’s largest textile workers’ union and activist groups are up in arms that the country’s leading retail chains, who source most of their fashion labels from Bangladesh, are refusing to sign a legally binding accord that will help to improve labour and safety standards in Bangladeshi garment factories.

Local Bangladeshi unions and international human rights groups have approached international clothing manufacturers to join the global initiative for improved building and safety conditions following the collapse of the eight-storey Rana Plaza on Apr. 24 that killed almost 1,200 factory workers.

“Companies that search the globe to find the lowest labour costs cannot claim ignorance (of) the consequences of that decision.” -- Michele O’Neil
As rescue teams pulled corpses and survivors from the debris in the town of Savar, about 25 kilometres from Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, they also found the charred remains of clothing labels bearing the names of major Western retailers like Walmart, H&M, Gap, Primark and many others who outsource their production to Bangladesh to avail themselves of cheap labour in the impoverished country of 150 million.

As a result, the proposed Bangladesh Building and Fire Safety Agreement requires companies to conduct independent safety inspections, make their reports on factory conditions public and cover the costs for needed repairs.

It also requires them to stop doing business with any factory that refuses to make safety upgrades and to allow workers and their unions to have a voice in factory safety.

Major Australian retail chains that source garments from Bangladesh, like Kmart, Target, David Jones and Big W, have not been connected with the Rana Plaza tragedy; but in the spirit of creating a global culture of ethical production, labour unions and rights groups like Oxfam Australia are urging them to sign the agreement.

According to their annual reports, Target Australia’s total revenue in 2012 was about 70 billion dollars, while Kmart, which runs 170 retail outlets across Australia, had revenues of roughly 3.8 billion that same year. Big W (a branch of Woolworths) increased their sales revenues by almost five percent last year to 53 billion dollars.

“Those companies need to (publicise) what they’re making in Bangladesh and they need to be completely transparent about their supply chain,” said Michele O’Neil, national secretary of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFU).

To date, “No Australian company has agreed to publish the location of their supplier factories,” Oxfam Australia’s Labour Rights Coordinator Daisy Gardener told IPS.

“This is important because it would allow independent verification of conditions by researchers, NGOs or unions who could visit the factory site and speak to the workers about wages, health and safety and other issues.”

She said it was “important that all Australian companies sourcing from Bangladesh” sign onto the accord, which gives workers the right to refuse dangerous working conditions.

It is possible that if the accord had existed prior to Apr. 24, the death toll would have been significantly lower: days before the disaster, huge cracks had appeared on the ceilings and beams of the building, which was intended to house just five floors.

Despite these clear signs, and warnings from engineers that a collapse might be inevitable, factory managers threatened workers with dismissal if they stayed away due to safety concerns.

Thirty international companies, including the Italian fashion brand Benetton, Spanish retailer Mango and British retailer Marks & Spencer, have so far initialed the binding agreement, along with other big names like Tesco and PVH (the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein).

In an angry email response to IPS’ queries, Kmart’s general manager of corporate affairs and sustainability, Tracie Walker, said, “We have not refused to sign the accord.” She referred IPS to the company’s “strong ethical sourcing code”, which is supported by “very stringent policies.”

Kmart says that none of the recent tragedies in Bangladesh occurred in factories that make clothes for them. The company says it organised a forum with its suppliers and auditors, and has also visited factories there.

“One of the key outcomes of the audit process was the identification of ‘high risk buildings’, which are those located above market places and factories located in multi-storey buildings with shared ownership,” the company noted. “Kmart no longer places orders with factories in these high risk locations.”

But activists like O’Neill do not believe that “brand-specific codes, self-regulation and private sector audits” will do the job, echoing activists in the U.S. who say refusals to sign the accord amount to admissions that companies “do not want to be held accountable for workers’ safety.”

According to O’Neill, only consumers have the power to force retail chains to sign the labour accord.

“The results of not having strong laws and unions is clear: look no further than Rana Plaza,” O’Neill noted in a statement on TCFU’s website. “Companies that search the globe to find the lowest labour costs cannot claim ignorance (of) the consequences of that decision.”

About 49 percent of Bangladesh’s population lives below the poverty line. Desperation drives many, particularly women, to seek work in one of the country’s 5,000 factories, taking on 10-hour shifts, seven days a week, in exchange for little more than 30 dollars a month.

Speaking on ABC national radio, Bret Inder, a development economist at Melbourne’s Monash University, said that Bangladesh has grown to be the world’s second biggest garments manufacturer precisely because it offers such a cheap workforce.

“Western buyers have been contracting out to producers all over, particularly in Southeast Asia and South Asia, moving from one country to the next (in search of) the cheapest labour,” he noted.

“There’ll be another country waiting in the queue if Bangladesh prices itself out of the market. To make an accord that is specific to Bangladesh doesn’t make any sense at all,” he added.

Others argue that Bangladesh is a special case that deserves targeted policies. Since 2005, at least 1,800 garment workers have perished in factory fires and building collapses, according to research by the International Labour Rights Forum.

The incident on Apr. 24, the industry’s worst disaster in history, came just months after a fire at a different factory, in November 2012, killed 112 workers.

Oxfam believes that the Better Factories Cambodia project, through which Cambodia gets easy access to U.S. markets in exchange for improved working conditions in the garment sector, may be a good model for Australia to follow.

“There have been international calls for garment companies to ensure they are paying factories enough to ensure workers (receive) a living wage,” notes Oxfam’s Gardener. “The Australian government can help educate Australian businesses about their responsibility to uphold the human rights of the people working in their supply chains.”

She added that the labour cost compared to the overall retail price is very small, sometimes just a few cents per garment, meaning Australian retail companies are able to pay their suppliers more without it having a significant impact on their bottom dollar.

A port of entry into Myanmar (Burma) from Thailand. Credit: Preethi Nallu/IPS

By Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau
BANGKOK, May 23 2013 (IPS)

Nangnyi Foung reaches into the dryer, pulls out another pair of pants and places it on the ironing board. “I still have several more loads to go,” she says as the clock strikes nine p.m., marking the start of her 14^th hour on the shift.

She has been on her feet in this laundromat in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai since seven in the morning and had been hoping to call it a day when two more customers walked in.

She is not in a position to turn anyone away: “I need the money. My family needs me to work,” she tells IPS, her voice tinged with desperation as she begins yet another load.

Six do-it-yourself washing machines stand like sentries at the entrance of this storefront-turned-laundromat. A flight of stairs leads to Nangnyi Foung’s living quarters, where she retires late at night only to collapse in exhaustion before waking up and beginning all over again.

Originally from the Shan State in neighbouring Myanmar (formerly Burma), Nangnyi Foung came here saddled with debt.

Fleeing persistent violence in her home country, she took out loans and paid middlemen hefty sums in order to win safe passage to Thailand, where, she had heard, employment opportunities awaited.

Ten years later Nangnyi Foung is still working to pay off her debt, awaking daily to a rigorous fourteen-hour shift of washing and ironing. Her earnings after seven days’ work without a single day off amount to little over six dollars, much of which is remitted back home.

Reaching for the steaming iron Nangnyi Foung tells IPS she saves on living expenses by sleeping in the basement of this facility. If she also had to pay for lodging she would not be able to send money home to her family of four.

Accounting for over 80 percent of Thailand’s 2.5-million-strong migrant labour force, Burmese migrants like Nangnyi Foung provide a lifeline to cash-strapped families back in Myanmar, one of Southeast Asia’s poorest countries that is struggling to recover from decades of economic stagnation.

Today, the minimum wage in Myanmar – about 180 dollars a month – buys eight to 10 times fewer daily consumption commodities like rice, salt, sugar and cooking oil than it did twenty years ago. The average Burmese lives on less than a dollar per day.

Though Myanmar is the world’s largest exporter of teak, jade, pearls, rubies and sapphires, and boasts lucrative extractive industries such as mining, timber and power generation, very little of the country’s natural wealth trickles down to the masses: approximately 32 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, while unemployment is at 5.4 percent.

According to a 2006 survey of migrant workers from Myanmar, conducted by the Asian Research Centre for Migration, more than two-thirds of the 600 respondents admitted to being unemployed before migrating to Thailand.

Remittances jump hurdles

While migrant workers fill crucial gaps in Thailand’s labour market, and their remittances account for five percent of Myanmar’s gross domestic product (GDP), neither government has attempted to make the flow of money between workers and their families any easier.

Despite the existence of commercial banks or official ‘Xpress Money’ outlets, most migrants prefer to use the informal remittance channel known as the “hundi” system.

These unauthorised transactions involve dealers in Thailand relaying messages to members of their network in Myanmar, who then deliver the necessary amount to the family.

Some migrants rely on friends and loved ones who travel between the neighbouring countries to act as conduits, thereby circumventing costly bank transfers.

“The banks can’t be trusted and they require a work permit, a letter of recommendation from our employer and a passport,” Nangnyi Foung says, documents very few migrants have access to.

Migrants with families in rural areas go through brokers, who deliver cash to the recipient’s doorstep, eliminating the hassle of them having to locate cash points.

According to a new report released Monday by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Asian countries dispatched over 60 million migrants into the world, “who sent almost 260 billion dollars to their families in 2012. This represented 63 percent of global flows to developing countries.”

Yet the continent seems ill equipped to deal with the influx of remittances, which benefit one in 10 Asian households.

“Although the clear majority of the region’s population lives in rural areas, 65 percent of payment locations are in urban areas,” the report found. In most Asian countries, only banks are authorised to deal with foreign currency transactions, making it difficult for poor rural communities to access funds coming in from abroad.

The report stressed the urgent need to provide remittance-receiving families with “more options” to secure and spend this money, especially since nine Asian countries currently receive remittances “exceeding 10 percent of GDP.”

The report has particularly vital policy implications for Southeast Asia, where 13 million migrants are currently living and working abroad. Thailand has become a “net importer” of migrant labour – attracting more than double the number of migrants to work in its expanding economy than it is sending abroad.

Women forfeit rights for employment

Constituting nearly 49 percent of the global population of 214 million migrant workers, women are responsible for the lion’s share of remittances flowing around the world.

Acutely aware of their families’ needs, like food, housing costs, education for children or younger siblings, and healthcare – women often endure extreme conditions in order to remit money back home.

The town of Mae Sot, located along the Thai-Myanmar border, hosts the largest number of women migrant workers in Thailand, who toil over fifteen hours a day in garment factories. In 2012, this sector netted estimated profits of 6.3 billion, while labourers who keep the industry running earned between 66 and 100 dollars per month.

Kyoko Kusakabe, associate professor of gender and development at the Asian Institute of Technology and co-author of ‘Thailand’s Hidden Workforce’, told IPS that most female migrants in Mae Sot “avoid labour strikes and forfeit their rights in favour of (continued employment).”

She says this is part of a culture that forces women to be “responsible” from a very young age, while their male counterparts have few obligations.

According to Kusakabe, this culture is reflected in remittance patterns: when the economy is booming, remittances from men increase, falling again when the economy enters a slump. Remittances from women, on the other hand, remain steady regardless of the overall economic climate, suggesting that women save more, or forego their own needs during times of economic austerity in order to preserve their family’s lifeline.

Her research found that even if women are not paid their salaries, or lose their jobs, they borrow money in order to send home, fearful that their children or parents will starve without financial support.