Labor policy and administration

Union officials and the garment sector’s factory association said yesterday they supported a new program meant to enhance relations between employers and employees, but remained sceptical of how effective it would be. In a ceremony yesterday, the Ministry of Labour inaugurated the program, which entails training ...

Civil servants have again pushed the government to introduce a long-awaited insurance plan for government workers injured on the job. In a June 10 letter to Minister of Social Affairs Vong Sauth, the Cambodian Independent Civil Servants Association (CICA) calls for a National Social Security Fund ...

Workers at a Kampot province cement factory began striking yesterday, protesting late payment of their salaries for May. The 224 employees of Cambodia Cement Chakrey Ting Factory in Kampot’s Teuk Chhou district said the company was supposed to pay them at the end of May but ...

Union members of the Ministry of Labour’s Labour Advisory Committee (LAC) will meet on Monday for a garment industry wage discussion focusing on ideas raised at a workshop in April. The invitation from Labour Minister Ith Sam Heng was sent to the seven LAC unions on ...

About 400 garment workers arrived for their shifts and monthly pay at Phnom Penh’s Hongkong Yufeng factory Tuesday only to find it shuttered and its owner nowhere to be found, workers’ representatives said. “Today is payday for the workers and since the employer did not have ...

Protesting workers at Ocean Garment factory say they are worried the manufacturer, which has suspended operations for one month, will close altogether. About 20 per cent of Ocean’s 1,300 workers demanding full payment during the break have found work elsewhere, while longtime employees are literally praying ...

A private clinic aiming to provide medical care to factory workers in the Phnom Penh Special Economic Zone (SEZ) will open this month, the health centre’s managing director said yesterday. ...

Union representatives stormed out of negotiations and continued a strike yesterday when managers at T&K Garment factory said workers would never receive the 2,000 riel ($0.50) daily lunch allowance allegedly promised to them. A week after they walked off the job, T&K workers at Por Sen ...

Amid complaints from union and labour rights officials of illegal firings over the years, Cambodia’s garment factory association is holding a course on the termination process in Preah Sihanouk province today. ...

A Ministry of Labour official yesterday vowed to go after any of his “corrupt” colleagues that deal with the garment and footwear sector, and urged workers to file complaints about substandard working conditions. ...

Before he was arrested in January, Vorn Pov and the union he created were not widely known outside of activist circles. But when he emerged from Phnom Penh’s CC1 prison on Friday, he walked away as one of the highest-profile unionists in the country, and a ...

Being placed on consecutive short-term contracts in Cambodia’s predominantly female-staffed garment sector is forcing many women to choose between a family and a factory job, unionists and rights groups said yesterday. Ken Chenglang, acting president of the National Independent Federation Textile Union of Cambodia, said many ...

More than 600 workers have fainted on factory floors so far this year, compared with about 800 such incidents over the whole of 2013, a Labour Ministry official said yesterday. Pok Vanthat, deputy director of the ministry’s labour health department and head of a committee that ...

Police yesterday morning blocked more than 1,000 garment workers as they tried to march from their Por Sen Chey district factory to the Ministry of Labour to plead for intervention. Management at the Ocean Garment factory informed staff on May 24 that it would close for ...

Three months pregnant at the time, Sam Ath doesn’t remember collapsing two months ago at the crowded, muggy garment factory where she works at the southwestern edge of the Cambodian capital. The 30-year-old woke up in a hospital bed, only to be told that she had ...

When Ros Srey Pich was 19, she signed a contract with a recruitment agency that would send her to work as a maid in Malaysia. The recruitment agency, Job Asia, had sourced the teenager from what is now Tbong Khmum province, telling her poor family that ...

Nine of the group of 23 workers and labour activists who were released from custody and given suspended sentences on Friday over January’s garment employee protests will receive medical care in Thailand, rights group Licadho said yesterday. A number of the men were beaten by security ...

About 30 workers at Ghin Yi factory fainted on Monday noon after learning that their colleague fainted at the factory in Chamkar Svay commune of Samaki Meanchey district of Kampong Chhnang province. ...

Twenty-five unionists, garment workers and bystanders were found guilty by the Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Friday for their involvement in three separate garment protest-related cases, but were handed down suspended sentences. The 22 men who had not been bailed ahead of trial were ordered ...

Verdicts will be handed down Friday in two garment protest-related cases that rights groups say were built on a weak body of evidence. The two cases occurred months apart but followed a similar narrative: Garment workers fed up with their calls for a higher monthly minimum ...

As several hundred garment workers from the SL Garment factory pelted police with rocks during a protest near the Stung Meanchey pagoda in November, Men Sok Sambath, a 14-year-old scrap collector, decided to join the crowd. “I saw other people throwing rocks at the [police] truck, ...

An International Labour Organization official yesterday called the draft of a Ministry of Labour trade union law “a step backwards” during the opening of a two-day workshop meant to hear concerns of both labour unions and employers. In a speech to worker representatives, members of the ...

About 700 workers at a Svay Rieng province electronics factory were to demonstrate for the third day today after management refused their demands for access to child care and the reinstatement of five union leaders. The provincial department of labour yesterday proved unable to sway management ...

About 1,000 workers protested outside Ocean Garment factory in Phnom Penh’s Pur Senchey district on Wednesday to demand compensation for being out of work while the factory suspends its operations for a month due to flagging demand from buyers, a union leader said. Workers have been ...