Cambodian garment workers' battle for labour rights deserves our support

[geovalin]

The Guardian, UK

People in the UK must voice their disapproval of the intolerable conditions facing textile workers in Cambodia and Bangladesh

Cambodian garment workers protest outside a factory in Phnom Penh. Photograph: Reuters

Last month, some of us will have unwrapped a new scarf, some running shoes or perhaps an old fashioned Christmas jumper. But few of us in the UK would have been aware that on 24 December, thousands of the people who made these items were on strike, protesting for better pay. Or that less than two weeks later, some of them would be dead.

The garment industry is a $5bn (£3bn) a year business for Cambodia. The clothes the country makes for high-street brands make textiles the country's largest export. And just last month, the Guardian reported that the country "has a reputation for fair treatment of workers".

But, as the new year violence illustrates, something has gone badly wrong. Tied up in opposition protests for new elections, Cambodia's garment workers' call for a higher minimum wage started a chain of events that led to a brutal police crackdown and the deaths of four of those on the picket line.

Trade unions and global brands recently signed a letter condemning the shootings and calling for action, but there's a wider issue here as well.

The textile industry came to Cambodia because labour is cheap relative to other countries, including China. But local traders say they fear one false turn could scare off the industry – and, with it, jobs and investment. This is the logic of a race to the bottom. And, as always, it's ordinary working people who are on the front line.

At the bottom of the pile are textile workers in Bangladesh, who are the lowest paid in the worldwide garment industry. The wave of strikes across Cambodia closed a year that the industry will always remember for one terrible event: the collapse of Rana Plaza.

More than a thousand workers died that day in a building known to be unsafe. Those who raised concerns about the creaking structure were offered a stark ultimatum: go to work, or lose your livelihood. In the end, they lost their lives.

The deaths in Cambodia and Bangladesh are first and foremost individual tragedies. But they are also extreme reminders of a simple fact: the people who make the clothes many of us wear often work under conditions that we simply wouldn't accept.

We all want a fairer deal for these people, but it often feels hard to translate that support into real action. We can act, however, and there are two things people in the UK should be doing that can make a difference.

First, the UK gives bilateral aid to Cambodia and Bangladesh. That gives us a voice, and we should use it.

In the case of Cambodia, we should be condemning the use of deadly force against protesters. We should not only be demanding a full investigation, but also insisting that trade unionists arrested for nothing more than campaigning for workers' rights are released. And we should be calling on the government to help negotiate a resolution to this crisis, beginning with the reinstatement of the 200 workers sacked for participation.

In Bangladesh, the UK should be doing everything possible to support the International Labour Organisation's call for better conditions, and insisting that all those affected by the Rana Plaza tragedy are fairly compensated.

Second, 2014 is a crunch time for the global community. This is the last full year before the UN publishes the post-2015 development framework – or in short, the next set of goals for how we want the world to work.

Top of the list is eliminating poverty, but this time we need to think beyond simple growth and trickle-down economics. People need jobs to get on, but they have to be decent jobs, too. As the world comes together to agree how it wants the future to work, that should be absolutely central to our ambitions.

The conditions of workers around the globe matter. And as the world moves to a new set of development goals, those workers have to be on the agenda, because development needs to be about much more than simply handing out aid – it should be about long-term progressive change. A fair day's pay for a hard day's work under decent conditions should be a basic right for us all.

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/jan/21/cambodia-bangladesh-garment-workers-labour-rights