May Day in Cambodia: Workers of the World, Unite

This is a cross-post from the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center website.

AFL-CIO Working America staff member Alison Omens reports from Cambodia, where she is part of a four-member U.S. labor delegation sponsored by the Solidarity Center. This is the first in a series of posts about her experiences during her 10-day visit.

Some truths: The Cambodian labor movement is a women’s movement. Eighty percent of union members are women. It’s also a young person’s movement. In the garment industry, which makes up the vast majority of the Cambodian labor movement, 63 percent of the local leaders are under 30. It’s also the best anti-poverty program in Cambodia today. Here, the union movement makes up a huge part of civil society. In a country that’s as marred by its leaders’ actions as Cambodia, the next generation of elected officials will come from unions—it’s the only large-scale training ground to develop leaders in the country.

It’s also impossible to talk about Cambodia and not include mention of the genocide. It’s right under the surface in a country that barely a generation ago experienced a mass execution of its citizens.

The union delegation to Cambodia, sponsored by the Solidarity Center and funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of State, is on its fourth day here, halfway around the world.

Each day brings a new adventure.

The highlight for me would have to be the massive march and rally on May Day. It’s a holiday that’s been largely forgotten in the United States. But here, workers were out in mass. Marchers came in from across Phnom Penh and surrounding areas to be there. Participants called for minimum wage for garment workers ($93 a month), longer-term contracts and no union discrimination. At least 7,000 people marched and rallied at the National Assembly, the largest number ever at a May Day event. It was a privilege to be part of it.

The call for a higher minimum wage was put even more into focus after we visited garment workers at their homes later in the afternoon. We met with women and men living four to six people in a bedroom the size of some Americans’ closets. Many have been living there for at least five years.

I’ll be writing a separate post on a roundtable discussion we had with a group of women union leaders, many of them former garment workers, who are building and training a generation of women workers for leadership. Their accomplishments in a few short years on issues such as maternity leave make ours pale in comparison.

On Friday, we sat down with a large contingent of the Cambodian union leaders, most of whom are not much older than me. (This isn’t happenstance. After the genocidal Pol Pot regime, the entire country is very young. The Solidarity Center doesn’t count leaders over 45 years old because there are so few of them.) We discussed challenges facing Cambodian unions and U.S. unions. It’s fascinating to realize that a union movement about a century younger than ours can face the same types of debates and concerns but from a completely different perspective. They’re worried about building infrastructure, selecting and electing leaders who will support workers and educating people with few resources on what unions are all about. They’ve also been hard hit by the worldwide economic crisis, with corporations using the same excuses we hear—that in this tough time, the last thing that the economy needs is collective bargaining agreements.

In fact, since we’ve been in Cambodia, the U.S. labor movement has staged a massive rally on the steps of Wall Street, calling out the kind of greed that Cambodians hear about every day in trying to get better wages for themselves. As I marched on May Day with thousands of Cambodians, I found myself thinking (dare I say it?), “Workers of the world, unite!”