Cambodia Sets New Minimum Wage for Garment Workers
Workers in Cambodia’s garment, footwear and travel goods sectors will be getting four extra dollars per month, half of which will come from the government, after minimum wage negotiations for 2024 concluded on Thursday.
The 2 percent increase, from $200 to $204, is far less than the $215 that workers’ unions were demanding. But their representatives in the tripartite talks were handily outnumbered, with 46 out of 51 votes going in favor of the $202 figure and just five choosing $213, the highest option on the docket.
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“We just want to demand a salary of $215 to make our lives better,” Keo Channet, a garment worker at the Poipet Hi-Tech factory told the Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association. ”It will not improve our lives that much, but will just give some relief to workers.”
The country’s National Council for Minimum Wage said that it put the issue to a vote after 20 prior negotiations failed to come to a unanimous agreement.
“We held the meeting today as the final day as there had still been no consensus in the previous meetings and there is still no consensus today after we asked them whether they still maintain their respective position or not so a voting was conducted transparently and accountably, which is based on the applicable law to find the final number,” said Heng Sour, minister of labor and vocational training.
In an audio message later in the day, Prime Minister Hun Manet confirmed the new threshold, to which he added $2.
“I have followed the minimum wage discussions closely from the start,” he said. “The improvement of the livelihoods of the people, including garment workers, is the highest priority of the government. Based on practical allowances, I decided to add $2 to the result of the vote. Therefore, the new 2024 minimum wage is $204 a month.”
The government also chipped in $2 per month when it increased the minimum wage by 3.1 percent from $194 in 2022 to $200 this year.
Christie Miedema, campaign and outreach campaigner at the Clean Clothes Campaign, the garment industry’s largest consortium of workers’ rights groups and unions, said that the meager bump was “extra egregious” in light of a recent ActionAid report, which revealed how the “long-term reality” of long-term wage loss has led to hunger, economic insecurity and crushing debt.
Written in partnership with the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, the Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions and the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union, the report blamed sportswear giants like Adidas, Nike and Puma for leaving workers to “languish” below the poverty line, though Adidas and Puma refuted this.
“Our research provides direct evidence that the current minimum wage for Cambodian garment workers is not enough to meet their daily cost of living and wages have decreased since the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Khun Tharo, program manager at the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights.
The sluggish global economy hasn’t helped, either. Cambodia garnered $5.49 billion in apparel exports in the first eight months of the year, a nearly 19 percent year-over-year decline, according to trade data.
Khun previously told Cambodianess that some of the nation’s biggest factories have laid off up to 20 to 30 percent of their workforce. And workers themselves say that they have lost 25 to 30 percent of their income compared with 2022.
Last month, Cambodia’s labor ministry reported the loss of nearly 11,800 garment, footwear and travel goods jobs from two dozen factories due to declining export demand.
“We need brands to act immediately and responsibly based on their commitments and promises to pay decent living wages to their workers,” he said. “No one making clothes for the world’s most popular brands should be living in working poverty.”
