Labour Standards in Global Supply Chains: A Programme of Action for Asia and the Garment Sector in Cambodia

Context

The garment sector is a key contributor to Cambodia’s economy, accounting for approximately 75 per cent of merchandise exports, and employing around 632,000 workers, nearly 80 per cent of whom are women. The sector’s value added accounts for nearly 11 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The sector directly provides income to one in five Cambodian households. The raw gender pay gap in Cambodia’s garment sector is approximately 4.5 per cent.

Objectives

In Cambodia, the two principal objectives of LSGSC project during its third and final phase were to strengthen the capacity of the ILO’s tripartite constituents to:

• Develop and implement evidence-based wage policy
• Engage in collective bargaining and social dialogue

Highlights

• In pursuit of the first of these objectives, through support to the national minimum wage system, LSGSC impacted the lives of workers and expanded decent work opportunities, with benefits for employers. LSGSC contributed to this outcome through a well-focused, intensive, and sustained programme of capacity building well anchored with the key actors and institutions of Cambodia’s national minimum wage system. Included in the programme were 12 training workshops on evidence-based minimum wage fixing criteria, designing and managing working time arrangements, the foundations of economics and statistics for trade unions, and a High-Level Workshop on Minimum Wage Monitoring, organized jointly with the Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training (MoLVT).
• LSGSC supported the development of Cambodia’s new law on minimum wage adopted in 2018, under which a National Minimum Wage Council is established with a mandate to set the minimum wage for the garment sector, and progressively expand statutory wage floors beyond the garment sector for the first time.
• The Cambodia Garment and Footwear Sector Bulletin, published twice a year by the project, supported evidence-based decision-making by ILO’s tripartite constituents in Cambodia in the context of minimum wage negotiations in the garment sector.
• At the request of the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia (GMAC), and trade union confederations, LSGSC provided facilitation, capacity building, and technical support to sector-level collective bargaining between GMAC and the Trade Union Negotiating Committee for the Garment Sector Collective Bargaining Agreement - (TUS-CBA). The TUS-CBA brings together 18 major trade union federations and confederations representing workers in the garment sector in Cambodia. The objective of these negotiations is to establish a sectoral-level (multi-employer) collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in Cambodia’s garment sector.

Cambodia Garment and Footwear Sector Bulletin

• Issue 1: Growth continues for Cambodia’s garment and footwear sector
  
• Issue 2: Solid first half of 2015 for Cambodia's garment and footwear sector
  
• Issue 3: How is Cambodia’s minimum wage adjusted?
• Issue 4: Trends in Cambodian garment and footwear prices and their implications for wages and working conditions
  
• Issue 5: Recent trade policy developments and possible implications for Cambodia’s garment and footwear sector
  
• Issue 6: What explains strong export and weak employment figures in the Cambodian garment sector
• Issue 7: How has garment workers’ pay changed in recent years in Cambodia
• Issue 8: Living conditions of garment and footwear sector workers in Cambodia