Monitoring for Nothing: Is the ILO’s ‘Better Factories’ programme failing the Kingdom’s garment workers?
The United Nations in Cambodia has taken a beating in recent months. The UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal has been plagued by high-profile resignations and accusations of political interference. Elsewhere human rights activists have criticised the UN’s failure to take a firm stance against an increasingly intolerant government. In February, the international body took another punch when academics from Stanford University attacked one of its flagship programmes in Cambodia. In conjunction with experts from the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), the academics openly questioned Better Factories Cambodia (BFC) – a much-lauded UN monitoring and reporting initiative launched in 2001 to improve working conditions in the Kingdom’s garment industry – in a report titled Monitoring in the Dark. ... “Cambodia is internationally branded as a sweatshop-free country thanks to BFC’s inspections, but the impact of the programme on workers’ well-being is far from glorious,” said Bent Gehrt, WRC’s Southeast Asia field director and co-author of the report. “While all neighbouring countries have witnessed important wage raises without any ‘Better Factories’ programme, real wages in the Cambodian garment sector have fallen by 16.6% over the past decade. Workers are poorer today than they were ten years ago, and the vast majority is now employed on short-term contracts. Impoverishment and job insecurity pushed them to accept excessive overtime in factories where basic health and security standards are often not even met. Under such circumstances, no one should wonder why mass faintings have become daily news in Cambodian newspapers.” ... Is the UN monitoring body toothless when faced with labour rights violations? “That’s the whole farce of the system as it is currently designed,” said David Welsh, Cambodia country director of the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity (ACILS), a US non-profit organisation supporting trade unions in developing countries. “BFC inspectors do a pretty good job at highlighting abuses in factories, but no one is obligated to take any action following their reports. BFC is just a monitoring programme with zero ability to enforce any decision. That is its mandate and deception is therefore huge for those who expect it to go beyond that.” ...
Frédéric Janssens
http://sea-globe.com/monitoring-for-nothing/
