A Hundred Lotuses Blooming? - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 201

wage, an amount they said was far below what they needed to survive. It was the largest
strike Cambodia's garment sector had ever seen, but came to an end after police were
deployed, unionized workers were fired, and threats were made against labor leaders. 34
Cambodia's economy remains so heavily reliant on the garment sector that the govern-
ment has acted decisively to stamp out any hint of instability in the sector.
Unions nonetheless represent an indigenous political force of increasing size and sig-
nificance. Unlike Cambodian NGOs, many of which remain reliant on foreign funding,
unions arose spontaneously in the 1990s to represent the interests of workers, who, des-
pite the relatively decent conditions in Cambodian apparel factories, still lived close to
the poverty line. Their collective bargaining efforts helped push garment workers' wages
from $27 per month in 1996 to $45 in 2000. 35 From their inception the labor unions were
also closely aligned with the political opposition. Chea Vichea was a founding member
of Sam Rainsy's Khmer Nation Party and garment workers appeared in large numbers
at opposition rallies. By the time of his death, Vichea had helped politicize a large and
growing slice of the working population. His appeal was all the more potent for being
based on tangible demands, rather than abstract invocations of civil or political rights.
After Vichea's assassination, however, the union movement became cowed and di-
vided. Dozens of progovernment and promanagement syndicates sprang up, swamping
the handful of independent and opposition-aligned unions that remained. In a population
of some 475,000 garment workers there are now an estimated 600 unions, most of them
aligned to the government. 36 The emergence of these “official” syndicates has followed
a familiar pattern. Like journalists, union leaders are paid or pressured to draw support
away from independent and opposition-aligned groups. They can earn up to $10,000 per
month by switching allegiances—an almost unimaginable amount for people who are of-
ten former garment workers themselves. 37
Promanagement unions now take up a majority of the seats allotted to labor on the na-
tional committee that negotiates minimum-wage increases, considerably diluting the bar-
gaining power of independent groups. This allows the government to keep wages compet-
itive while preventing the unions from becoming the locus of a more broad-based polit-
ical movement. Instead of letting independent, democratic unions flourish—the sort of
groups that could engage in serious collective bargaining on behalf of workers—the gov-
ernment has tried to dilute the power of the labor movement by diffusing its membership
among hundreds of groups.
Union leaders continue to work hard for better wages and working conditions, calling
frequent strikes and walkouts. But even when they succeed the authorities try to take
the credit. In March 2013, after months of negotiations, labor unions finally secured an
increase in the monthly minimum wage from $61 to $80. (Nine months later, it was
raised again to $100 amid fresh strikes.) Shortly afterwards, Hun Sen addressed a crowd