Cambodia’s garment industry is regularly plagued with strikes and protests. But when armed security forces opened fire on striking workers in the capital city of Phnom Penh on Jan. 3, killing five and injuring dozens, it suddenly became clear that this was not just another protest.

With the situation left unresolved since, advocacy groups are urging clothing brands to review their purchasing practices and take action to ultimately end low wages, which are at the root of the bloody demonstrations in Cambodia.“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’?" -- Liana Foxvog

“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.”

Statutory minimum wages determined by national governments and industries usually fall short of workers’ demands. In the case of Cambodia, the government first offered to raise monthly pay from 80 to 95 dollars, then to 100. Striking workers, however, insisted that the minimum level should be 160 dollars.

Asia Floor Wage, which has been campaigning for higher minimum wages across garment-producing countries in Asia, believes that if statutory minimum wages are not high enough, multinational companies need to be involved.

“Garment workers are producing for the whole global industry, so multinationals should pay the difference between statutory minimum wage and living wage,” Bhattacharjee said.

“This is not an unfair demand, but brands are still not agreeing to provide the money for it,” she said.

In fairness, major clothing brands did not stay silent after the crackdown in Cambodia.

The majority of Cambodia’s exports to the European Union (EU), over 89 percent, are textiles such as garments and shoes. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

Companies including American Eagle Outfitters, Gap Inc. and Levi Strauss & Co. have sent an open letter to Cambodia’s government expressing their concerns over the recent violence. They also called for the government, manufacturers and trade unions to develop a regularly-scheduled wage review mechanism.

In a statement sent to IPS, Levi Strauss & Co. said it is “firmly committed to sourcing in Cambodia” and encourages peaceful resolution to end political unrest. Meanwhile, a spokesperson from Gap Inc. said the company strongly opposes any form of violence, calling for negotiations among stakeholders to peacefully resolve the dispute.

According to the Washington-based International Labour Rights Forum, while it is commendable that brands are willing to speak up, further steps must be taken.

“Brands and retailers need to agree to voluntarily pay higher prices for apparel products made in Cambodia and require the factories to therefore pay higher wages,” Liana Foxvog, communications director of the Forum, told IPS.

She said that 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.

The solution to the problem, she said, is to have all brands and retailers develop long-term relationships with suppliers so they have more control in the working conditions offshore.

“We need workers to once and for all have a fair living wage and will no longer have to face hunger and mass fainting,” she said. “We know companies can pay more.”

No end in sight

One month after the killings of strikers, there is still no end in sight for the crisis.

Human Rights Watch released an urgent statement on February 3, demanding the Cambodian government to ensure that garment factories stop intimidating and threatening workers seeking to form unions and assert their labour rights.

Last week, the U.N. International Labour Organisation (ILO) 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 garment industry is also very important because its workers, most of whom are women, not only support themselves but also send remittances to their families.

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.

“If Cambodian workers were satisfied with their job and felt that the pay and the working conditions were adequate, probably we would not see quite so much unrest,” she said.

“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.”

Consumer guilt

Professor Benjamin Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, told IPS that consumers should not feel guilty when they buy low-cost products made in developing countries.

The term “sweatshop”, he argued, 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.

While Cambodia successfully slashed the national poverty ratio from 50 percent in 2007 to 20 percent today, it is still listed by the World Bank as a “low-income” economy.

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.

Asia Floor Wage’s Bhattacharjee is hopeful that developing countries such as Bangladesh and Cambodia would soon progress to the next economic level. But for that to happen, the issue of low wages has to be dealt with.

Garment-producing countries need to take wage completely out of the competition and start competing instead on logistics or raw material supplies, she said.

As broader protests continue to sweep Phnom Penh streets, the strikes of garment workers have become more politically charged.

But 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.”

Thousands of public sector workers in Turkey are on a two-day strike in support of anti-government demonstrations.

The strike was called by The Public Workers Unions Confederation in response to “state terror implemented against mass protests across the country”. It said the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had “shown once again … enmity to democracy”.

The confederation, which has an estimated 240,000 members in 11 unions, said the strike would last for two days.

Al Jazeera’s Rawya Rageh, reporting from the capital Ankara, said that the strike call was significant: “They are trying to send a message, that this is not just youth on the streets, this is not just about a park or individual demands – this is about something bigger.”

However, she said that the success of the strike remained to be seen: “It has to be said that unions are not that strong in Turkey. This is going to be a test to show that they are able to deliver on what they say.”

The workers’ strike comes in the wake of four days of mass protests against the Islamic-rooted government of Erdogan. At least two people, both men, have died in the demonstrations.

The first was killed in an accident with a taxi in Istanbul. The second man died during a protest in Antakya, close to the Syrian border. The NTV television channel said Abdullah Comert, 22, was shot in the head, but authorities disputed the claim, saying he suffered a blow to the head rather than a bullet wound.

‘Police abuse’

Social media was awash with reports and videos of police abuse. Turkey’s Human Rights Foundation claimed more than 1,000 protesters were subjected “to ill-treatment and torture” by police.

Bulent Arinc, the deputy prime minister, on Tuesday apologised to protesters hurt in the clashes and said that he would meet some of the original organisers of a protest to save Gezi Park in Istanbul. That protest widened to anti-government demonstrations following a harsh police response.

Despite facing the biggest challenge to his rule since he came to office in 2002, Erdogan left Turkey earlier on Monday on an official visit to Morocco, where he insisted the situation in his country was “calming down”.

He earlier rejected talk of a “Turkish Spring” uprising by Turks who accuse him of trying to impose religious reforms on the secular state, and dismissed the protesters as “vandals”, stressing that he was democratically elected.

Erdogan has blamed the protests on “extremists”, “dissidents” and the main opposition Republican People’s Party.

“The situation is now calming down … On my return from this visit, the problems will be solved,” he said in Rabat.

“The Republican People’s Party and other dissidents have a hand in these events.”

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Fadi Hakura, a Turkey analyst at the Chatham House think-tank in London, said: “I think that the prime minister has really adopted a really defiant and confrontational approach towards the protests taking place in Istanbul and across Turkey.

“He has already accused them of being extremists; he has suggested there’s a link between the protesters and foreign plotters.”

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Map of La Guajira peninsula showing the Cerrejón mine, the railroad tracks and Puerto Bolívar. On the left is the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains and on the right, Venezuela. Credit: Felipe Osorio/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Feb 23 2013 (IPS)

Two weeks into an indefinite strike called by workers at Cerrejón, one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world, the company has agreed to sit down again and negotiate with Colombia’s National Union of Coal Industry Workers (Sintracarbón).

Negotiations, which had been broken off by Carbones del Cerrejón on Sunday, Feb. 17, are back on track with tentative meetings between company representatives and leaders of Sintracarbón, an affiliate of IndustriALL, a global trade union organisation that represents 50 million workers in a 140 countries in the mining, energy and manufacturing sectors.

Representatives of both sides met in the afternoon of Feb 22 to “discuss the methodology for resuming negotiations,” Sintracarbón president Igor Díaz announced on Twitter.

The decision by Carbones del Cerrejón — a joint venture between the multinational corporations Anglo American, BHP Billiton and Xstrata — to return to the negotiating table was most likely influenced by a change in attitude on the part of the Colombian government, who stepped in to play a role as mediator in this conflict.

In a laconic text message late on Wednesday, Feb. 20, Labour Vice-Minister José Noé Ríos told IPS: “We’re moving ahead. We’re still looking for a way (to solve the conflict) and overcoming the mutual distrust” between the parties.

The following day, Ríos was able to bring two representatives from both sides together to discuss the conditions for reopening negotiations.

A leader of the governing Liberal Party and former peace commissioner, Ríos is an experienced negotiator and in this opportunity he was called on to mediate by Sintracarbón.

Nobody, however, can accuse the vice-minister of “helping” the union, a Sintracarbón advisor told IPS. The source spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity and not as an official spokesperson for the union.

All things considered, after a week of efforts, Ríos’ mediation seems to be yielding results.

Another factor that probably played a role in the company’s change of heart was a social protest demanding a resumption of negotiations, staged on Feb. 21 in the northeastern department of La Guajira, whose economy revolves around the Cerrejón pit and its 9,870 workers.

The protest was initially called by local merchants as a measure apparently against the union, but it was taken up by the population who turned it around. And not just because the demand for dialogue coincides with Sintracarbón’s position.

Carbones del Cerrejón — and with it Guajira politicians and the government — came out of the civic strike looking badly in the eyes of the public, according to the union advisor interviewed by IPS.

During the strike, a usually silent population demonstrated loudly in front of closed stores and businesses, protesting the lack of a healthcare system in La Guajira and the missing royalties paid by Cerrejón to the government, allegedly misappropriated by corrupt local politicians.

Merchants and business operators also decried the environmental damage and health problems caused by coal mining and criticised the scarce development of La Guajira.

The company operates in the area since 1983, mining high-quality thermal coal, but only 10 percent of its purchases and contracts are conducted in Colombia, and less than one percent in La Guajira, the country’s fifth poorest department.

Carbones del Cerrejón established four foundations, with different purposes: strengthening government and accountability in La Guajira; promoting the construction of aqueducts and sanitation works; expanding micro-businesses; and fostering the sustainable development of the Wayuu indigenous people, who represent 42 percent of the Guajira population.

These foundations are financed with the company’s “tax deductions”, Álvaro Pardo, head of the extractive economy analysis centre Colombia Punto Medio, told IPS, and “the work they do has little impact, as is evident from the unsatisfied basic needs index and the alcoholism and illiteracy rates” in La Guajira.

According to his calculations, the almost five million dollars provided by Cerrejón from 1982 to 2002 in compensation to the Wayuu communities, are the equivalent of two and a half days of the company’s coal production.

The Red por la Justicia Tributaria en Colombia, an organisation of Colombian academics and activists who advocate for a fair tax system, mining companies deduct royalties and manipulate prices to lower the sums they are required to pay the government.

The company’s willingness to find a prompt solution seemed in doubt on Feb. 19 when Carbones del Cerrejón’s marketer, Coal Marketing Company (CMC), which exports 90,000 tonnes of coal per day, declared “force majeure” to get out of paying daily fines for not meeting supply contracts.

CMC had 15 shipments scheduled for Turkey and Europe between Feb. 7 –when Sintracarbón called the strike– and Feb. 18.

Force majeure can be invoked in extreme situations, such as natural disasters and strikes. On its website’s home page CMC proudly, and somewhat belatedly, announces: “We have never declared Force Majeure.”

Union records show that from 1986 to date Carbones del Cerrejón and Sintracarbón signed 12 collective bargaining agreements. This is the first work stoppage in the mine in 18 years.

In September 1995, nine workers were fired after a five-day strike called to protest against the quality of the food served by the company’s canteen.

In 1996, Gustavo Palmezano, a unionist who had participated in another Sintracarbón protest against two layoffs, was murdered. Half of the trade unionists murdered in the world over the last four decades were Colombian.

Díaz and another Sintracarbón negotiator have received repeated threats against them and their families since the list of demands was submitted in late November.

Carbones del Cerrejón condemned the threats, backed Sintracarbón when it reported them to the police, and urged the government to grant adequate protection to the unionists and their families.

According to data from Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, 30.3 percent of the world’s energy today comes from coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, whose gas emissions are a leading source of global warming.

With coasts on two oceans and very vulnerable to climate change, Colombia is the world’s fifth coal exporter.

Although in 2011, global coal consumption was up 5.4 percent from 2010, as per information from British Petroleum’s Statistical Review of World Energy, other power sources also increased, pushing international coal prices down.

The 2010-2014 National Development Plan projected an annual production of 124 million tonnes, at prices higher than today’s.

In 2012, 89.2 million tonnes of coal were extracted in Colombia, according to data from the Ministry of Mining and Energy.

In its conflict with Sintracarbón, Carbones del Cerrejón has claimed that prices have dropped 35 percent in the last two years.

The illusion of a development driven by the “mining locomotive”, as President Juan Manuel Santos likes to call it, crashes head on with the government’s weak enforcement of what are already lax regulations.

More than 90 percent of Colombia’s coal comes from fields mined by foreign companies. Carbones del Cerrejón is the single largest producer, with 38 percent.

The company’s operations extend over 800 square kilometres in the Guajira peninsula, bordering with Venezuela. It has its own railway lines running through the isthmus to Puerto Bolívar, a private port on the Caribbean sea which is used exclusively by Carbones del Cerrejón and CMC.

The company reported that in 2012 it exported five percent of global coal production: 32.8 million tonnes. This volume determines the amount of royalties the company must pay the government for extracting non-renewable resources. But the government does not control the volumes actually exported by large mining companies.

Sintracarbón is asking for an eight percent raise in wages — most Colombian workers received a four percent increase in average — and the company is offering five percent.

Carbones del Cerrejón says it agreed to a raise that doubles last year’s inflation and a bonus of 7,250 for each worker, in addition to “maintaining and improving all the benefits enjoyed by workers.”

While the company’s machinery, technology and productivity are on a par with U.S. and European companies, Cerrejón miners are paid five times less than their peers in the North, according to Colombia Punto Medio and other sources.

“Prices have dropped, but the enormous profits of the mining companies have not shrunk. They’re selling coal at about 60 dollars a tonne, but in 2001-2002 coal was 35 dollars a tonne and it was still profitable,” Pardo said.

The vice-president of Sintracarbón, Jairo Quiroz, believes Carbones del Cerrejón is trying to bring down the cost of production per tonne by cutting labour costs.

“That’s what they’re aiming for in this negotiation. Which is why they’re putting up less economic resources to respond to the workers’ list of demands,” Quiroz told IPS.

Miners at the Marikana platinum mine in South Africa have begun returning to work after agreeing a pay deal.*

Striking workers went back to work on Thursday at the Lonmin plant, the scene of violent protests in which dozens of miners were shot by police in August.

The return to work came as the final day of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) conference took place in Midland, Johannesburg.

Cosatu is expected to decide whether it will open its own inquiry into the Marikana shooting and the state of the country’s mining industry.

Many striking miners have left the unions that represented them.

Mike Hannah, reporting from Johannesburg, said: “The government has put a policy in place with regard to the mining companies, the government’s position is that some mining companies like Lonmin who own the Marikana mine have not met their full agreement as they have agreed with the government as a whole.

“Now you are going to see pressure from the company ramping up to carry through things like renovating the hospitals where workers stay and better living conditions in and around the mines.”

Tear gas

On Wednesday, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters near a mine run by the world’s biggest platinum producer Anglo American Platinum, as unrest spread after strikers at rival Lonmin won big pay rises.

Within hours of Lonmin agreeing pay rises of up to 22 per cent, workers at nearby mines called for similar pay increases on Wednesday, spelling more trouble after six weeks of industrial action that claimed more than 40 lives and rocked South Africa’s economy.

Police clashed with a crowd of men carrying traditional weapons such as spears and machetes in a township at a nearby Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) mine outside the city of Rustenburg.

Officers fired tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets to disperse an “illegal gathering,” police spokesman Dennis Adriao said. He had no information on any injuries.

Anglo American later issued an ultimatum to their striking workers to end the strike.

“Anglo American Platinum has communicated to its employees the requirement to return to work by the night shift on Thursday 20 September, failing which legal avenues will be pursued,” the firm said in a statement.

The ultimatum by the world’s top platinum producer came after police arrested 22 people in protests after it had urged workers to return to five mines that were shut down over safety fears last week.

The number of dead from the unrest rose to 46 when a woman was struck by a rubber bullet on Wednesday as police dispersed mine protesters, Central Methodist Church Bishop Paul Verryn, who has been counselling striking miners, told the Reuters news agency.

“We want management to meet us as well now,” an organiser for the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) at Impala Platinum, the second biggest platinum producer, told Reuters.

“We want 9,000 rand (1,100 dollars) a month as a basic wage instead of the roughly 5,000 rand we are getting,” said the organiser, who declined to be named fearing recriminations from the firm.

Lonmin deal

A labour activist said workers who had stayed off the job at Amplats, which accounts for 40 per cent of global supplies of the metal used for catalytic converters in cars and jewellery, were inspired by Lonmin and would press on with their demands.

“The mood here is upbeat, very celebratory,” said Mametlwe Sebei, a community representative near Rustenburg. “Victory is in sight. The workers are celebrating Lonmin as a victory.”

President Jacob Zuma expressed relief at the pay deal after criticism from the opposition and media of the government’s handling of the crisis – not least in the aftermath of the police killing of 34 Marikana miners on Aug. 16.

Further fuelling union rivalry, jubilant workers at Lonmin’s Marikana mine, 100km northwest of Johannesburg, painted the wage deal as a victory for AMCU over the dominant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), an ally of the ruling African National Congress.

Lonmin shares rose more than nine per cent in early trade on news of the pay deal, but gave up most of those gains as the reality of the extra costs to a company struggling with a shaky balance sheet and unprofitable mine shafts sunk in.

Platinum prices rose a little on Wednesday after falling 2.6 per cent a day earlier on news of the Lonmin deal.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.