There are more than 400,000 garment workers in Cambodia, and more than 90% of them are women. Many have moved to the city from poor parts of the countryside, and they’re trying to make money for their families back home. But what’s really happening in the industry? This program investigates the fainting of nearly 200 women in a factory that supplies Nike. Then the story of three young women who were shot during a protest at a factory that supplies Puma. It looks at how the industry responded, at who’s watching over, and how one small factory could change the equation altogether.
For Voice of Democracy Radio, Heather Stilwell reports.
Part One
The strangest nickname I’ve ever had came from university. My roommates started calling me ‘No Logo.’ It’s a book by Naomi Klein about corporate brands like Nike and the Gap. How their products and logos have invaded our public space, and how so much of this stuff is made halfway around the world in sweatshop conditions. I was never really vocal about it, but yah, I preferred my clothes not to look like a billboard ad – especially one that had been sewn together in a factory full of kids.
But just last year, I was packing for a trip to Cambodia. And without even thinking, I went out to H&M and bought a stack of plain, $10 T-shirts.
Then I got to Cambodia, only to find out that hundreds of female workers had just fainted at a factory that makes clothes for H&M.
And it wasn’t the first time. The same thing was happening in factories all over the country. Factories that supplied brands like Wal-Mart, Levis, Puma – the list goes on and on.
Now it’s almost one year later, and it’s still happening.
How is it okay?
I had to vent about it all with a friend from home. I didn’t want to feel complicit, but I couldn’t help it. So many companies are involved.
He said to me: “What are you supposed to do … just wear a burlap sack?”
It’s a good question. Even when we want to do the right thing, it’s so hard to know what the right thing is. It’s kind of like showing up in the Congo with a Nikon camera to show the injustice of kids digging up conflict-minerals. But those minerals are used to make – well – cameras.
Navigating the system is tricky, but when people’s lives are involved, it’s got to be worth stopping to ask: what’s behind the products we buy?
So that’s what this program is about – the events are set in Cambodia, but it’s not just a Cambodian story. It’s about the messier side of the clothing industry. And it’s about connecting our clothes to the people who make them.
Wal-mart theme song
This song is from a Wal-Mart commercial that played on TV a while back. It’s all about their cheap products. So on the screen you’d see this big yellow smiley face, and it’d be bouncing around the store, lowering all of the prices.
Garment workers lay in the emergency ward after fainting at their factory (Photo by Heather Stilwell)
Doing research for this program, I came across a quote from Sherrie Ford, a long-time factory owner in America. She said, “Every-time you see the Wal-Mart smiley face, whistling and knocking down the prices – somewhere there’s a factory worker being kicked in the stomach.”
It’s one way of saying that there’s a hidden cost to brand name goods. But I wondered if it’s really that hard to see …
This past April, nearly 200 workers fainted at a factory that makes clothes for Nike – a multinational sports label I’m guessing you’ve heard of. They were taken to the hospital, so I took a drive outside the capital to see them. When I arrived, I found the workers crammed into a single emergency ward. There weren’t enough beds for everyone, so rows of women were strewn across the floor.
One woman actually collapsed right in front of me. I watched as two men hoisted her up on their shoulders and lowered her back down on the ground – slumped in this tiny little space in the corner.
I knew they were struggling, but I needed to ask these women what had happened at the factory.
This is Chay Ny, a 24-year-old worker who was lucky enough to get a bed in the ward. She said she smelled something strange when she got to work, then she started to feel dizzy and collapsed. Thirty-three-year-old Pang Simourn told me that she saw another worker faint, and then she collapsed too.
I looked around the room, kind of in disbelief. Then I saw another woman, standing there in her factory uniform. Printed on the front of her shirt was her factory logo – a big yellow smiley face.
Sherrie Ford had it right on this one. But this wasn’t just one worker being kicked in the stomach. It was hundreds.
—–
It’s reported that more than two thousand women fainted at the factories in 2011 alone.
So what’s going on? The jury’s still out on that. It’s happening again and again, but no one seems to have a solid conclusion as to why.
Dave Welsh is the head of the American Centre for International Labor Solidarity. He worked on labor rights in Bangladesh before coming to Cambodia in 2011.
Dave: “It’s a tricky issue, because unquestionably something has been happening in all of these factories. So it becomes a question of,ok, what is the core issue here? Forced overtime, terrible ventilation, being overpowered by fumes, and nutrition issues. You name it. All things that are easily fixable.”
Seems clear enough. But that’s not what the Cambodian doctor explained to me that day at the hospital. He told me that only a few of the women had actually fainted, the rest simply collapsed from shock. I really didn’t see the difference, and I thought something must have been lost in translation.
But a bit of digging would soon make the whole thing a bit clearer.
—–
Back in August 2011, there were two separate mass-faintings at a factory that supplies H&M. To their credit, H&M hired an auditor to assess the factory.
Their findings confirmed what it seemed like everyone already knew: there was no single catalyst for the fainting – it was the poor conditions for workers overall. All things that are fixable, like Dave said.
But as you continue to go through the factory report, things take a bit of turn.
The report details pages of health risks inside the factory. But then it concludes that most of the so-called fainting is caused by a women’s psychological issue called “mass psychogenic illness,” – better known here as mass-hysteria. It means that only a handful of women actually faint – the rest go into shock from what they’ve seen, and collapse.
In a few tidy paragraphs, the diagnosis cut the number of women we should be concerned about – from 100 or so, back down to 2 or 3.
It’s pretty surprising that this ideawas so widely validated. All they had to back it up were a few medical articles, each written by the same guy back in the 70s. But mass-hysteria’s pretty captivating, I guess.
Dave: “I put no value in this psychological disease. It’s sort of pathetic. That doesn’t mean that brands and the factories don’t have to focus on the root causes.”
Mass-fainting aside, workers will tell you that women faint in small numbers on a pretty regular basis in factories.
Just last year a factory was found to be operating in 35 degree Celsius heat, with next to no ventilation. One or two women were fainting in this factory everyday.
This doesn’t get reported much and it needs to. But unless it’s a massive fiasco, no one really seems to notice.
—-
After leaving the hospital, I wanted to follow what Nike was actually doing to respond. Over the next few days in the local paper, I’d read articles with headlines like: Nike executives ‘swoosh’ in to town – making them look like some sort of sports-superstar, ready to take home the trophy for corporate social responsibility.
There was no recognition of the fact that the only reason Nike had to ‘swoosh in’ in the first place, is that there’s not one single Nike representative who actually works in Cambodia.
—-
Back in February, Cambodia hosted a two-day public forum to discuss workers’ low wages.
Right now the minimum is set around $61 a month plus bonuses.
But over two days, an auditorium full of workers and experts made one thing pretty clear. This simply isn’t enough money for the women to even eat properly – and maybe that could explain a bit about why they don’t always have the strength to stand.
Brand reps from H&M and the Gap were both invited to the wage forum – so they could hear how low salaries are affecting Cambodian women’s lives. Both refused to attend.
The garment industry is Cambodia’s biggest export earner. It brings in around 4 billion dollars a year. It seems like healthy workers should be in everyone’s interest.
So why not raise the minimum wage?
Here’s the counter-argument. If the workers press too hard for higher wages, the companies will flee. They’ll take their business somewhere cheaper.
Dave: “It really is the brands putting the squeeze around the world on the industry. But the industry doesn’t mind, because the people who suffer are not the owners, the people who suffer are the workers.”
Part Two
This next story takes place at a factory located on what’s called a Special Economic Zone.
These are concrete, fenced off regions of a country designed to attract foreign investment.
It’spretty easy to see why factory owners set up there – low tariffs, tax holidays – and a hefty supply of cheap labor. The website for this zone advertises to investors that housing and meals for workers need not be provided.
It might explain why the workers in this next story were asking for more…
—–
Keo Nea, Nuth Sakhorn and Bun Chenda work together at Kaoway factory. They spend their days making sneakers for the German sporting goods company, Puma.
This is their story.
On Monday, February 20th, the women arrived at work as usual. Soon, it all went to chaos.
It turned out that workers from two neighboring garment factories had been striking over the weekend. They were asking for a better wage, but neither factory could reach an agreement.
Now, the Kaoway factory workers, they hadn’t been involved in the strikes – and when they arrived to work on Monday they had no plans to be. But the manager of Kaoway apparently wasn’t willing to take any chances.
Reportedly as a precaution, he locked the gates to the factory and had police on stand-by. So that morning, more than a thousand Kaoway workers were stuck outside the gate. That’s when the striking workers from the other two factories came over to join them, and a new, even bigger protest began.
The women didn’t see exactly what happened next, but eyewitnesses say that a man arrived in a car with a driver and a bodyguard.
He took out a gun and shot openly into the crowd.
——
Nea, Sakhorn and Chenda were each caught in the crossfire.
Nea was shot in the arm, Sakhorn – through her back.
Chenda got it the worst. She took a bullet to the chest that went straight through her and out the other side.
As the three women were rushed away for treatment, Chenda was near death.
Moeun Tola is the Head of the Labor Program for the Community Legal Education Centre. When news of the shooting broke out, he jumped in to help.
Tola: “No one had any hope that Bun Chenda, the most serious one, would survive.”
While those on the ground tried to save the young women, a statement was released by Puma. Watching all the way from Germany, they saw the events a bit differently.
Their statement reported that only one woman was injured, that she was not in critical condition, and that she would be released from hospital within a week. They said that – despite reports to the contrary – they couldn’t even confirm that the women were employees of their factory.
Tola: “It was so sad that Puma released a statement trying to drop all responsibility. So we didn’t do anything to debate them, we just asked them, if you come to Cambodia, we will show you how seriously the workers got injured, and whether the workers were shot in the Puma supply chain.”
The next day, Puma printed a retraction and acknowledged that three Kaoway workers were shot. They sent a rep to Cambodia to meet with Tola and he brought them to visit Chenda. She was still in critical condition and she couldn’t afford the kind of treatment she needed.
Tola told me that the Puma rep asked him, what should we do?
He had one suggestion for them.
Tola: “Save the people’s life.”
——
Tola: “So then Puma decided to pay and wished to transport her to the VIP medical care. So then she got better treatment, better service, so that’s the story.”
Thankfully Chenda survived, but that wasn’t the end of the story.
Once the confusion had died down and it was clear the women were in stable condition – word started to spread as to who actually fired the gun.
The culprit? Chhouk Bundith, the town governor.
——
Bundith is said to have a lot of power in town, and local officials tried to buy the women’s silence with cash and motorbikes. As scared as they were, the women refused and decided to file a complaint.
Bundith eventually confessed and was charged with “causing injury without intent.”
Desperate to support their families, the girls have since returned to work at the factory. Back to work at the same place they were shot.
And Bundith? Well. He walked free.
—–
So what about the Puma response?
I contacted a Puma rep who flew in after the shooting, but she refused to comment.
Dave met with Puma after the shooting though, so I asked him what he thought.
Dave: “I would have liked to have seen them do more in terms of world-class health care. They did due diligence, let’s put it that way, but given the profit margins they get out of Cambodia and frankly that they pride themselves as being the most corporate socially responsible company in the industry, more could have been done.”
In this year’s first quarter alone, Puma took in a net profit of nearly one billion US dollars. Chenda’s room at the hospital cost around $80 a night.
So Puma was more than able to cover the cost of her treatment. Like draining all of the blood out of her lungs – twice.
About a month after the shooting, some of the big brands got together and wrote a letter to the Cambodian government, expressing their ‘deep concern’ and ‘alarm’ over the incident.
They suggested a full and transparent legal investigation into the case, and ended by saying they would ‘continue to stand by Cambodia through this period.’
Some applauded it as a strong statement, but to me, the letter seemed pretty weak. It seems that the only way the brands could have been alarmed, as they said, is if they weren’t paying any attention in the first place.
In Cambodia, violent crackdowns are pretty common. Speaking up for decent working conditions is a pretty dangerous pastime here.
Just look back to 2004, when union leader Chea Vichea was shot and killed while reading the morning paper on the street in Phnom Penh. Two more unionists were killed later in 2004 and 2007.
In July of this year, on the same day U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came into town – police arrested a union leader after he petitioned for better working conditions. First though, they beat him bloody, on the streets, in broad daylight.
In this context, even if the investigation were ‘full and transparent’ like the brands called for, even if that were to happen – witnesses are too scared to talk.
Tola: “Because the gunman is still at large, all the people, they are really afraid. So it’s very hard for us to find an eyewitness. They are not brave enough now to give a testimony in the court. That’s why we keep pushing the brands, not only Puma, but all the brands to keep urging the government to provide rule of law on the case.”
Dave: “There is a communal responsibility if you are making enormous sums from Cambodia, then all brands really have to get on the bandwagon. There’s always more you can do.”
——-
About a month after the shooting, Tola said he felt that there wasn’t enough being done and he wanted to visit the Special Economic Zone to find out more about what happened.
The zones are overseen by the Cambodia Development Council – or CDC. It’s run by government ministers, and you need official authorization to get inside.
With Puma’s help, Tola was able to set up a meeting at the factory, but when he arrived, he was held outside the zone gates for more than an hour. Eventually he was taken to a waiting room and given the bad news – the CDC wouldn’t let him in.
A representative from the factory told Tola that he was sorry, but that he couldn’t do anything against the wishes of the government.
Tola: “I asked him, ‘why?’ He said, ‘If we do something against them, we have to close our factory.’ So then we understood their difficulty, we don’t mind whether they cheat us or not, we left the zone.”
I contacted a member of the CDC for an interview. At first he agreed, but then he called to say that he was denied permission to speak with me. He said there was no one else at CDC who would answer my questions.
Part 3
So how do the brands ethically justify using factories in these conditions?
The buzzword is always corporate social responsibility. Basically, all of the things they’re doing to monitor their business and to show they care.
Most brands require that the factory owners agree to a Code of Conduct. It’s a list of do’s and don’ts, pretty vaguely outlining how workers should be legally treated. But how well are they being enforced?
Here’s Dave.
Dave: “There’s no bigger bull-shit term than corporate social responsibility, particularly when it applies to the garment sector. These guys have so much leverage to improve so much. I would be out of a job if they did their jobs, but I don’t see that happening for some time.”
So who else is watching over the factories?
That’s where the Better Factories Program comes in – also known as the BFC.
In 1999, the United States signed an agreement to give a boost to Cambodia’s garment industry. The US would favor a certain amount of Cambodian exports – as long as the factories were monitored and met the standards of the International Labor Organization – or ILO.
So in 2001, the BFC was set up to watch over. Compared to other countries where clothes are made, the program gave Cambodia a reputation as a responsible place to do business.
So how does the monitoring work?
This is Jill Tucker, the Chief Technical Advisor for BFC.
Jill: “Teams of two go into the factories, and they’re just trying to get a feel whether factories’ practices are in compliance with labor law.”
Me: What are some of the challenges you run into?
Jill: “Yah, the same old challenges that you find in monitoring factories all over the world. Factories try to hide things, they try to coach the workers, they don’t tell you the truth.”
Kim Meng is a worker and union leader at her factory in Phnom Penh. She said that factory owners make sure that the monitors are kept in the dark.
Meng said the biggest problem facing workers is the use of short-term contracts – technically known as FDCs. At her factory the standard is just 2 months. Even for workers who are in it for the long haul, the contracts are simply renewed again and again, sometimes for years.
Meng says workers don’t want these contracts, but they have no choice. The contract makes it so easy to fire them, so workers don’t dare speak up about anything.
The thing is – Cambodian law says all contracts must become long-term after 2 years. But this law is openly broken throughout the industry.
I asked Dave, isn’t there something in a brand’s code of conduct that would say to a factory – if you don’t stop using these contracts illegally you’ll lose our business?
Dave: “That’s the problem, it’s one thing to say it, it’s another to let the factories that you source from still practice it. Usage of the contract is widespread and it’s illegal.”
Dave says that all brands need to come onside to tackle these issues. And the way the industry is structured, it would be pretty difficult for a single brand to do it alone. The supply chain is actually pretty tangled.
A single factory doesn’t usually just make clothes for a single brand – it could be making clothes for the Gap, Levis and Puma all at once.
And that factory can subcontract some of its work to another factory inside the country – these subcontracted factories aren’t exporting outside the country, so they don’t even have to be registered or monitored. They’re basically outside the system … free from any oversight. And there are said to be hundreds of them.
Still, the clothes all end up in the same spot – on the same rack in a store that claims to be responsible. With all the potential for abuses to slip under the table, I wondered why the brands don’t save themselves the PR trouble, and invest instead in their own individual factories.
Dave: “It’s not in their interest to do that. My opinion, they understand that inherently it’s a brutal industry and so by having it structured this way it’s perfect for the brands. Because they make such an enormous profit margin out of it and if abuses occur, they can, sometimes they make legitimate interventions, or they can pull out, or they can say, ‘hey, it’s not us,’ they can wipe their hands of it. There is a reason why this industry operates in all the worst countries for workers’ rights.”
So we rarely here about all the things that go wrong in the supply chain. Especially when those things are illegal and exploitative contracts. Those don’t tend to make as much noise as a gunshot, or hundreds of women collapsing at once.
Back to the BFC.
BFC publishes factory audit reports – and these reports would say when a factory is breaking the law. But they’re sold exclusively to brands, and outsiders can’t get their hands on it.
Dave: “In terms of the program, it lacks teeth because all they can do is report, and the reporting itself is largely private. At the end of the day, it’s up to the brands or the factories to self-regulate.”
It wasn’t always this way. Before 2006, information on conditions in specific factories was publically available. So why the backward shift in transparency? It happened before Jill started with BFC, but I asked her if she knew why.
Jill: “It’s actually difficult to get an answer on that, but there was a switch toward trying to improve conditions through training and advisory services, and not through transparency. Having said that, we’re re-exploring the transparency issue now and we’re committed to releasing some information about reports, but, we have had discussions with people within the government and they basically supported this move, but only if we provide training with the factory first. So that they have knowledge about how they can improve the situation and they’re given a chance to improve the situation and then we will go transparent. So we’re working on that right now.”
Heather: So go transparent, after you’ve solved the problem?
Jill: “It’s not that easy to solve a lot of these problems. A lot of factories are not trying to actively solve their problems.”
This is Bent Gehrt from the labor rights monitoring organization Workers Rights Consortium. He says that BFC’s shift in transparency is what allows factories to let things slide.
Bent: “Unfortunately there has been a decrease in BFC transparency and it’s not helpful at all. When things aren’t reported in a transparent manner, it is easier for factories not to make any improvements.”
One of the interesting things about BFC, is that it’s partly funded by the major brands that source from Cambodia. Again, it wasn’t always this way – brands didn’t start paying until 2006. Maybe it shows that they’re investing in compliance, but still, I wondered if a brand should fund the same program that was meant to inspect its potentially bad behavior. I asked Jill if she saw any sort of conflict of interest there.
Jill: “I don’t think it’s a conflict at all. I think they should pay more. Just because a brand purchases a report, never influences the content of that report. Never ever.”
Maybe not the content. But a 2011 report on the BFC written by American academic Haley Wrinkle points out another possibility. She says that BFC started holding back information, right around the same time the brands started to fund the program. That’s when specific factory conditions stopped being public, and that’s when we lost our ability to connect those conditions to brands.
Bent says he can see why the brands might have an interest in secrecy.
Bent: “What they have right now is the best of both worlds – they have the ILO’s good name, but they themselves don’t need to do anything. We cannot see whether a brand is actually reading the reports they receive from ILO Better Factories, or whether they’re responding to them, because it’s all happening inside what we can call a black box.”
Bent says the brands have the power to change it.
Bent: “If all the buyers actually demanded, that we want more transparency, we want all the reports, or at least ILO to report what is happening in each individual factory, otherwise we wont buy from Cambodia, well, things would happen. So they have the power to implement a more transparent policy, and since they haven’t then we can suspect at least, that this is because they like it this way.”
Bent knows all about the power a brand can have. Again, he’s part of WRC. It’s the labor monitoring organization that works with Alta Gracia – a new garment factory in the Dominican Republic being hailed as a model for workers rights … A model for what the industry could really achieve – if it really wanted to.
The factory makes t-shirts and sweatshirts for a single US brand called Knights Apparel. And in one of the poorest cities in the Dominican, the workers are paid a wage that’s actually three times the legal minimum. Alta Gracia is actually helping its workers out of poverty.
Bent: “They’ve paid back their debt, the workers have also been able to send their children to school, some have started their own education, some of even started to build a new home. This has also lifted the entire community in the area.”
So how did they do it?
Much of it comes down to the brand, Knights Apparel.
The WRC estimates that for a basic industry sweatshirt, the cost of labor is about 1 to 3% of what we actually pay in the store. So for a 40 dollar sweatshirt, workers wages can be tripled at a cost of 1 to 2 dollars a piece. Brands who want higher wages for workers generally could choose to pass this cost on to the factory or the consumer.
But, Knight’s Apparel didn’t pass it on anywhere. They cover it.
And it’s not just increased wages. A union was set up before the factory even opened. Bent says that the workers’ freedom to speak openly is a crucial part of why everything works so well.
Most importantly, Knight’s Apparel and Alta Gracia have proven, that a clothing company can pay a higher wage, and still succeed on the global market. I asked Bent if it would be possible for the model to be replicated in Cambodia.
Bent: “It should probably be easier to do it in Cambodia, the question is now whether other brands are willing to do it, not whether they are able to do it, because it has been shown that they clearly are.”
——
I started out this whole thing trying to find some answers about what’s really going on in the garment industry. Garment work is doing little to help Cambodians out of the poverty that brought them there, and Cambodians deserve better.
The BFC has made improvements for workers. But how much of that is outweighed by the way their policies protect the brands? Whether they want to or not, they’re helping the brands to hide. And the brands are already pretty good at that.
All of the brand reps I contacted for this piece refused to speak. I was always referred to head offices, miles away – where no one actually has to watch the effects of their business on Cambodian workers.
And Chhouk Bundith made it clear that there are those in power who will resort to some pretty drastic measures to keep workers quiet. I can at least understand the logic … if they forced a raise in minimum wage, the brands might run. But shooting a few young women? That just gets you a letter.
The system is broken. But that depends on who you ask.
For many who profit from it, the system is broken just the right amount. And when the brand reps fly back to their respective countries – it’s Cambodian women who are left to deal with it.
