The Cambodian struggle to increase the minimum wage

Interview with:

Bean Channy, Project officer CLC

Meas Vanny, Legal Officer of C.CAWDU

There are about 700,000 footwear and garment industry workers in 700 factories in Cambodia, the sector which accounts for the lion’s share of the country’s exports. Hence, increasing the minimum wage for this sector has a huge impact. In the past two years, the efforts from the trade unions to get the minimum wage increased have met with much resistance and oppression, and also led to actions around the world, targeting Cambodia’s diplomatic representations and the big brands buying clothes in Cambodia.

Can you explain a bit of the history regarding the struggle for the minimum wage in Cambodia?

Workers’ stories related to a living wage

Source: Asia Floor Wage and Clean Clothes research

Sovann's dream: Enough to eat (Cambodia)
“They told us the shipment was urgent. We were scared of being insulted and forced. We worked even when we were sick. We worked even when we didn't have enough sleep or enough food. I'm so broken down.“

Ratna’s dream: a safe pregnancy (India)
Ratna was 8 months pregnant and working as a contract worker in Bangalore when she began to suffer labour pains.  She had no choice but to go to work as it was a salary day and she could not afford to miss her wages – if she was not present she would have to wait until the end of the month to receive her pay.
The pains worsened around 10 am. She approached her supervisor for permission to leave, but was told she must ask permission from the manager.  She was finally able to leave at 12.30pm, but was further delayed by the security guards.  By the time she left the factory she could barely walk 10 feet and ended up giving birth on the footpath.
It was too late to save the baby, with the umbilical cord uncut due to no proper healthcare, by the time she reached home her baby had died.

Nupur’s dream: to finish school (Bangladesh)
Before starting work in the garment factory, Nupur, 19, was living in a village and attending school but was not able to continue after the 5th grade. Her parents could not pay the school fees anymore. Nupur and her father are the only breadwinners in the family. Her father cannot work all the time due to a chronic disease. The family depends on Nupur’s wages as a garment worker.

Salong’s dream: a safe bathroom (Cambodia)
“The room is tiny [2m x 3m] and ugly. We only have one mat, one mosquito net and a gas stove for the four of us. I earn US$80 a month.  We pay US$40 a month for this one room – everyone pays US$10 - electricity and water included. That’s a lot but we’re lucky because the landlord installed a bathroom attached to our room. It makes us feel more secure.”

Mim's dream: the clothes she makes (Bangladesh)
Mim produces clothes for major western brands that are seen on highstreets across €ope.  Like many young woman, Mim, 23, dreams of dressing up, but on the poverty wages she earns this remains a dream. "I really like the clothes I make, and I would very much like to wear them myself. But I could never afford them!"

Phalla’s dream: Saving for her own atelier (Cambodia)
Phalla earns US$120 a month including overtime, she supports her family including her parents who are sick and also has health problems of her own. Phalla's dream is to save enough money to go to school and open her own atelier, but she says saving money as a garment worker is impossible. “I can never save any money,” she said. “If I did, my parents would die and I would too.”

Asian Labour Builds a Global Movement for Living Wage: The Asia Floor wage

Anannya Bhattacharjee, 

International Coordinator, AFWA 

Garment workers in Asia, the majority of whom are women, currently earn around half of what they require to meet their own and their families’ basic needs, such as for food, water, education and health care. Living wage has been a key demand among labour activists in the garment industry for a long time. The demand has been made to the brands over a long period with very little progress beyond rhetorical support. Three main arguments have been put forward by reluctant brands. First, that there is no common definition of a living wage and no method of calculation; therefore, it is not possible to pay something that is not defined. Second, that any attempt to demand a living wage at a national level results in relocation across the border; and therefore is punitive to national economies. Third, that demand for a living wage is often driven by Northern activists without a collective demand from the global South.

 

India: hard data towards the rights of unorganized workers’ decent living income

By L.A. Samy, 

Steering Committee member for India, 

Executive Director of AREDS

Why study the informal sector with regards to a decent living income?

In India, the size of the informal sector, which comprises 94% of the worker population, is increasing day-by-day and it has been accelerating at an alarming level with the implementation of globalization policy in 1991. Since India was an agrarian nation, it was the agricultural sector that provided employment opportunities to millions of illiterate and literate masses in India. Next to the agricultural sector, it was the small scale and the cottage industries which provided livelihood opportunities to millions of people in India. 

Minimum vs fair vs living wage – concepts

• Minimum wage: the lowest remuneration that employers may legally pay to workers.
• Fair wage: basically, somewhere between the living wage and the minimum wage. ‘Wage levels and wage-fixing mechanisms that provide a living wage floor for workers but ensure competitiveness and refers to skills, tendencies in the sector or country standards, but not to the needs of workers.
• Living wage: the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their needs that are considered to be basic, to maintain a safe, decent standard of living within the community. It should allow a worker to be able to buy food for him/herself and family, pay the rent, pay for healthcare, clothing, transportation and education and have a small amount of savings for when something unexpected happens. 

What is a minimum to live: ILO context and instruments

By Bart Verstraeten, WSM Political Secretary

Since the 19th century, the idea that labour is not a mere commodity that can be owned, traded or exploited like any other raw material, has gained ground. This basically means that labour has to be rewarded, that workers had to be remunerated for their hard work. The most common way of doing so is by paying them a wage.

Most prominently, this idea was incorporated in the ILO Constitution which entrusts the ILO to promote “policies  in  regard  to  wages  and  earnings [….] to ensure a just share of the fruits of progress to all, and a minimum living wage to all employed and in need of such protection”.

Over the years, the ILO developed several international labour standards on this topic. The standards offering the broadest protection in that regard are Convention 131 (C131) and Recommendation 135 on minimum wage fixing, adopted in 1970. Key features of these 2 standards are:

• Governments are required to put in place and maintain specific machinery to fix minimum wages and to adjust them periodically.
• Representative organisations of workers and employers have to be involved in this minimum wage fixing machinery.
• Minimum wages have the force of law.

How to compare minimum wages

Let’s look at two countries: the minimum wage for an hour in Belgium is almost 9 €, in Nepal it is 34 €ocents, 26 times less. But is life not much cheaper in Nepal than in Belgium? So let us compare in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity), a fictional currency which compares currencies through a basket of standard products. In Belgium, minimum hourly wage would be 10,31PPP and in Nepal 1,21PPP. Not as huge a difference, but still 8.5 times less, especially if one considers that many Nepalese are paid less than the minimum wage, while many Belgians earn more than the minimum wage (Belgians on average earn 22 €/hour).

Strength in numbers

463,000 years: that is how long a worker would have to work to have the same annual income of the CEO of the French company LVMH, Bernard Arnault. And in 2007, the 200 workers of this factory Ecce based in France, were fired because the company shifted production to countries with lower salaries. Whose salary should be lowered though?

Quote from 1933 on meaning of living wages

“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.... By living wages, I mean more than the bare subsistence level - I mean the wages of a decent living."

Franklin D. Roosevelt's Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act, 16 June 1933

Help save Philippino Hospital

11 critical days are left to save Fabella Hospital before the new President Duterte take over the administration from leaving President Aquino.

WSM partner Alliance of Health Workers (AHW), health workers, patients and the community continue its mobilisation. Inside the world's busiest maternity ward where 100 babies are born every day:

• 300 mothers arrive at the Dr Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital each day;
• The hospital serves a Manila slum named Tondo, built on a rubbish dump;
• Mothers share a delivery room with at least five other birthing women;
• Head midwife Anna Prebus has delivered around 200,000 babies;
• New babies and their mothers sleep five or more to a bed;
• Hospital is the subject of new BBC documentary World's Busiest Maternity Ward

Read more here at the Daily Mail or watch this video.

Video on exchange regarding elderly in Belgium and Bangladesh: GK meets OKRA

In this video, you can see how enriching international exchange can be. In May 2016, 4 representatives of health care organization GK from Bangladesh came to Belgium for an exchange week with OKRA, the elderly movement of the Christian Workers Movement in Belgium.


They exchanged on how to make sure elderly people get what they deserve (ex. a decent pension, access to health care, etc.) and on how to organize the elderly.

Find out in this video what they learned from this experience.

W-Connect Latest edition: on Decent Living Income

We don’t live to work, we work to live. This saying sums up a lot of what we deal with in this edition of the W-Connect newsletter, which focuses on a decent living income. Or living wage. Or just or fair wages. No matter the term, no matter the way of calculating it or which formula you apply, I think we should all agree, we work to live and not the other way around. Unfortunately, it is a far stretch from today’s reality. Many work very hard and struggle to simply survive, not even to live decently.  When it becomes a luxury not only to buy a pair of decent shoes, but to buy food or shelter. And what about spending time with your family, to help your children with homework, or take them for ice-cream. Many are only surviving, getting the minimum out of life.

Legally set, the minimum wages are often too low in Asia to live decently. In 19 out of the 26 states in India, minimum wages (of which there are 1.200, as they differ per sector, per state and between urban and rural areas) are even below the poverty line, let alone any decent living income, as was researched by the WSM partners.

This edition also looks closer at the garment sector, which can be key for the struggle for decent living incomes. It employs 25 million workers in more than 100 countries and in 2013, apparel trade amounted to 460.27 billion dollars, with more than 60% of it originating from 10 Asian countries. Out of the top ten world garment exporters in 2013, seven were from Asia. In the region, China, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Cambodia have covered the bulk of garment production in the last decade. Bangladesh became the second largest producer of garments after China because of its lowest wages for 4 million workers. A race to the bottom which should become a climb to the top, by guaranteeing decent living incomes to all workers, in Asia as around the world. This was already understood in 1948, as article 23 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and for his family an existence worthy of human dignity."

How much longer till this becomes reality?

Download the full version here.

Asia Floor Wage Alliance presents its first documentary: Living Wage Now!

The 105th International Labour Conference gets underway

The 105th International Labour Conference gets underway in Geneva, Switzerland from 30 May to 10 June. This year's session brings together over 4,000 delegates from around the globe to discuss the most pressing issues facing the world of work today. Youth employment, global supply chains and decent work in fragile states will all be high on the agenda.


On behalf of WSM, Bart Verstraeten will attend among others. Together with Bart Vannetelbosch (Central Supply and Services) and several of our partners we are going to the Commission to examine how to ensure decent work in global supply chains. We all know the challenges of the supply chain: the workers in the textile sector who receive poor wages or lose their jobs when they are pregnant; workers in the free trade zones that can not organize or become members of trade unions; miners without contracts, without social protection.

This commission has the mandate to conduct a general debate, that is to say:
- To gather the views of the ILO tripartite stakeholders;
- Determine a new mandate for the ILO in this area.

Fortunately, we had the opportunity to prepare with our partners in the international seminar organized by KSBSI and ACV-CSC in Jakarta in late April. At the end of our seminar, we adopted a final document which comprises our claims (here). Some of these claims will be the basis of our advocacy in the coming days.

And when we say "our" advocacy, we refer to our great delegation. With ACV-CSC colleagues, IYCW, WSM, CCC, KSBSI, CLTM Indonesia and Mauritania, and other colleagues and partners who are coming, hopefully we can influence discussions.