By: Ama Marston

Cambodia's garment industry and the challenges it has faced in implementing a pilot labor monitoring program-instituted through a US-Cambodia bilateral trade agreement provide important lessons for other countries, particularly those in Africa, as they struggle to balance the demands of market competition with the protection of workers human rights.

This paper explores the extent to which labor monitoring in Cambodia has helped resolve the myriad challenges that workers face, particularly given the end of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA) which regulated garment exports to US and EU markets over the past 30 years. It concludes by drawing together a number of lessons from Cambodias experience that are of relevance to other developing nations seeking to foster economic and social development while ensuring respect for fundamental rights. Among these lessons are the necessity for transparency and multi-stakeholder support for monitoring, a functioning judiciary to resolve labor disputes, government support for unions, and gender sensitivity in monitoring and program development.

Introduction

Cambodia and its garment industry are at the center of significant worldwide speculation as human rights activists, labor experts, government officials and development agencies watch to see if improvements in respect for labor standards will give the country's garment industry an advantage in the face of increasing international competition.

The end of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA), which until 2005 regulated garment exports to US and EU markets, constrained large producers like China, and allowed garment industries to flourish in smaller, less technologically advanced countries, has drawn attention to Cambodia's experience. Under the MFA, Cambodia signed a multilateral trade agreement with the US that linked export access to US markets with improvements in labor standards. It is widely agreed that the resulting labor monitoring, carried out by the International Labor Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency, has created a number of beneficial changes in Cambodia's factories.

The end of the MFA has not resulted in a mass exodus of factories and buyers from Cambodia due to increasing international competition as once predicted. Yet garment industry workers express concern about the increasing hardships they face, many of which are not covered by international minimum labor standards but which, nevertheless, are of direct relevance to international human rights such as the right to just and favorable conditions of work. Article 7 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights guarantees all people the right to work conditions that ensure remuneration which provides, for example a decent living for themselves and their families.

Given its efforts to find a balance between labor standards and market competitiveness, Cambodia provides a number of lessons for other countries, particularly in Africa, that rely heavily on the economic contribution of the garment industry.

Cambodia's garment industry and labor monitoring as a latecomer to the textile industry, Cambodia was not a part of the MFA. As a result, larger garment producing countries like China began to use Cambodia as an intermediary to avoid the export quotas placed on them by the MFA. In addition, efforts to liberalize the economy also attracted foreign investors from China, South Korea and Taiwan to build Cambodia's textile industries. American and European companies used Cambodian factories to avoid limitations put on their imports of products from other countries. As a result, the industry grew considerably in Cambodia, with the value in exports rising from $26 million in 1995 to $2 billion in 2004, constituting nearly 80 percent of the country's exports.