New York Times - July 12, 2001
The A.F.L.-C.I.O. Organizes in Cambodia By WAYNE ARNOLD
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - The black clouds of an early monsoon were piling up outside as Jason Judd of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. paced before a classroom of local union leaders and labor organizers, lecturing on what it takes to force garment factory managers to the negotiating table.
"How do I get recognition?" he asked in a voice honed over years of organizing in the Deep South - part Sunday sermon, part half-time pep talk. "How can I get it?"
The class hesitated but didn't really need to hear the translation to know how to respond. "Omnaich!" they replied. Power.
"I didn't hear you," he said.
"Omnaich!" they yelled back in unison.
"If you can't say it," Mr. Judd said, "you can't have it."
Phnom Penh may seem far afield for America's umbrella labor organization. But the A.F.L.-C.I.O. has become active here and Cambodia has emerged as a test case in perhaps the most contentious issue on the international trade agenda today: establishing a floor under labor conditions in developing countries.
Cambodia is at the center of the debate thanks to a landmark 1999 agreement that makes it the only country whose garment exports to the United States are dependent on factories here living up to an internationally recognized labor code.
In addition to complying with a new labor law that lays out basic rules for health and safety on the factory floor, Cambodia is also required to allow unions to operate, to eliminate child and forced labor, and to work to prevent discrimination.
Supporters of the Cambodian arrangement, which is up for review later this year by the Bush administration, hope that it will set a precedent for future trade agreements by demonstrating that establishing such minimum labor conditions can work to the benefit of all.
In most developing countries, however, political leaders are adamantly opposed to any linking of worker standards to trade agreements, arguing that imposing rules from outside threatens to undermine the competitive advantage they need to support their own economic development.
Here in impoverished Cambodia, where the garment industry is the biggest export earner, the trade agreement has garnered a more mixed reaction. Many hope that submitting to American sensibilities will turn "Made in Cambodia" into a sign of merit to consumers. Yet they also fear that efforts like Mr. Judd's to make workers' voices heard will only drive manufacturers to countries like China and Vietnam, where conditions may be worse but the glare of scrutiny less severe.
"We may become a victim of our own openness," said Sok Siphana, secretary of state at Cambodia's Ministry of Commerce.
At the same time, the standards do not necessarily speak to some of the most critical conflicts within the industry, like those over pay and forced overtime. And despite the agreement, unions have made only limited gains in organizing garment factories in Cambodia. While they operate more openly than in many other poor countries, they have been stymied by fierce opposition from factory owners, most of whom operate on thin margins and are often squeezed themselves when dealing with the multinational apparel merchants.
Mr. Judd, the American organizer, arrived here in February in hopes of improving the situation for workers. With funding from the State Department's Agency for International Development, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s American Center for International Solidarity he runs here now offers seminars on organizing that draw not only union leaders, but also human rights groups and members of Cambodia's influential Buddhist clergy.
"We're helping these new unions to get stronger," he said. "We're helping them to build independent and democratic unions."
Cambodia's apparel industry was created almost overnight in 1996 by a bilateral trade agreement with the United States that cut tariffs on most Cambodian goods to 4 percent from 17 percent. Flights to Phnom Penh soon filled with investors from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore eager to build factories.
From seven garment factories in 1994, there are now roughly 300, employing 170,000 people, mostly women. The industry earned $965 million last year, three-quarters of it exporting to American companies like Gap, Nike (news/quote), Levi Strauss and Sears, Roebuck.
Though it means 11-hour days of monotonous toil six days a week, a job in a garment factory is highly coveted. In a good month, with overtime, an average worker can take home $70, three times the national average. Workers often pay up to $50 in bribes just to land a garment job.
In 1997, a violent coup drove most investors and aid agencies away from Phnom Penh, but not the garment factories. The same year, Cambodia adopted its new labor code, written with help from the A.F.L.- C.I.O. and the International Labor Organization.
Workers were quick to test their new rights. After refusing to work on a Sunday, Doung Sotheavy, now 31, remembers her Singaporean employers calling her into their office to sign a document. The next time she refused to work on a Sunday, the document said, she would resign.
Ms. Doung Sotheavy walked out, exhorting her co-workers to follow. When only a dozen came, she rented a public address system. "If you don't help me this time," she remembers calling to those still inside, "no one will help you next time."
The next day, the factory went on strike. A union was born, one of more than 75 started in the last four years. Last July, garment factory unions won a minimum wage of $45 a month, a first for Cambodia.
The incentive to improve working conditions and permit unions has come from Washington, where in 1998 trade negotiators were preparing to put quotas on fast-growing Cambodian garment imports. Amid pressure from American unions and public opinion, the Clinton administration pushed Cambodia to accept unprecedented conditions: if Washington decided in an annual review that its industry was in "substantial" compliance with Cambodian labor law and international standards, it would raise Cambodia's quota by 14 percent.
At the moment, the agreement is only barely on the Bush administration's radar screen. Few of the officials involved in such a decision are in place yet. "We expect to review this more closely as we get closer to the fall," an administration trade official said.
Condemned by Cambodia's Southeast Asian neighbors as a breach of sovereignty, the agreement has its share of holes. Perhaps the biggest is that it does not specify how Washington should determine whether Cambodia complies. Cambodia's own labor inspectors are poorly trained, and unions complain they are too easily bribed. The United States and Cambodia agreed to pay the International Labor Organization to set up an independent monitoring program, which is just beginning and has not yet made its first assessment.
Government officials, manufacturers and union leaders hope clean bills of health from the I.L.O. will give Cambodia an edge over cheaper labor elsewhere. "People will see the improved situation isn't perfect, perhaps, but good," said Van Sou Ieng, president of the Garment Manufacturers Association. "Then everyone will come to Cambodia and say, `Give us space. Take our orders,' "
But labor organizers say that inspectors can do only so much. That much was demonstrated last fall, when a British documentary uncovered what it alleged was child labor at a factory routinely visited by inspectors from Gap and Nike. Union leaders and outside groups say that child labor is actually rare in Cambodian garment factories. The biggest problems, they say, center not around such traditional issues as under-age workers, ventilation or fire exits, but on retaliation against union leaders and forced overtime.
Gap says factory managers have tried to foil inspections with falsified payment records. Gap and Nike both pulled out of the factory highlighted in the documentary, citing a variety of uncorrected problems.
"If you're not in there it's hard to make sure that ongoing commitments the factory may have made are sustained," said Todd McKean, global director of compliance at Nike, which has withdrawn entirely from Cambodia as well.
Unions are more reliable watchdogs, organizers contend. And what happens, Mr. Judd asks, when workers decide that the minimum standards enforced by monitors are not enough? "To fight that fight," he said, "they're going to need a union."
Tall, thin and pale, Mr. Judd cuts an incongruous figure in Cambodian labor circles. Now 29, Mr. Judd developed a taste for organizing in 1992 when, as an economics student at Duke University, he helped a group of poor, minority women working the abattoirs of North Carolina's pig and poultry industry get a free clinic.
After a year abroad, he joined the Service Employees International Union in New Orleans, organizing street sweepers, school cafeteria workers and garbage collectors. Last year, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. hired Mr. Judd, who had since moved to Texas, to man its "solidarity center" in Phnom Penh.
Critics of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s actions here and elsewhere say it mostly represents American labor's efforts to protect jobs at home by thwarting low-cost competition from abroad. And they see it as an example of how labor, from the left, and traditional protectionists, from the right, are finding common cause to intervene in foreign countries.
"The circle kind of connects," said Ernest Z. Bower, president of the U.S.-Asean Business Council, which represents private sector interests in Southeast Asia. "They work together to make the yardstick impossible for the Cambodians."
Cambodia's unions seem to need little encouragement. In 1999 alone, they held 76 strikes, according to the United States embassy, most wildcat, some violent.
Such frequent strikes not only jeopardize the industry, Mr. Judd said, they are also a sign of union weakness. "If unions are better organized," he said, "they won't be striking all the time."
The American embassy estimates that no more than 0.2 percent of Cambodia's work force, which is largely rural, is unionized, most of it in garment factories. Of Cambodia's six union groups, labor activists say only one can be considered independent of political or commercial influence.
But even as the various labor federations bicker among themselves, would-be union leaders face greater challenges on the factory floor, where they say managers routinely interfere with organizers, harass members and fire leaders.
A former paratrooper named In Chinda took over the job of running the union at his China-owned factory after the group's president was fired this year. When the managers refused to re-hire his union president, Mr. In Chinda led the workers in a strike. Union leaders were finally invited to negotiate, but managers brought police officers to the meeting to arbitrate.
"I'm here to learn how to make my union stronger," Mr. In Chinda said before sitting down to listen to Mr. Judd.
While many labor activists back home hope that the United States will persuade the W.T.O. to include labor rights as part of trade deals, Mr. Judd sees his work here as a race against time. In 2005, the W.T.O. provision that allows major industrial countries to set garment-import quotas is scheduled to expire, removing the only lever currently available to enforce labor standards.
Developing countries have long sought to eliminate the quotas because they serve to protect apparel makers in the advanced industrial nations. But pessimists say that without country-by-country quotas, apparel makers may simply consolidate in bigger labor markets, like China and Mexico.
Let them, insists Sok Ha - if companies don't measure up. Ms. Sok Ha, a student of Mr. Judd's, lost her job at one factory after the union she joined pressured the Ministry of Commerce to withdraw its license.
But that only made her more defiant. Today, she is president of a newly formed federation. "We don't want to close down any factory," she said. "But better to have fewer companies that pay better. We want companies to obey the law more than we want new investment."