The family of a worker who was killed when a ceiling collapsed at Kompong Spue province footwear factory lasts week has accepted 9,000 in compensation, and in return has agreed not file a complaint against the company, the deceased’s wife said yesterday. ...
Rim Sarouen, 22, was one of two workers... continue
The European union’s executive arm has responded to its parliamentarians’ concerns over rights abuses stemming from Cambodia’s economic land concessions, maintaining that, should the need arise, it “will be ready” to withdraw from its preferential trade agreements with the Kingdom.
In a joint letter to concerned members of parliament on Wednesday, European Commission member Karel De Gucht and vice president Katherine Ashton said they were monitoring the situation, and had stressed to the Cambodian government the importance of reforms, as well as the consequences of losing the no-tariff agreement, commonly known as “Everything But Arms” (EBA). …
One of the conditions of the EBA is that beneficiary countries adhere to rights declarations such as the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention Concerning Minimum Age for Admission to Employment, both of which concessionaires – particularly in the Kingdom’s sugar industry – have been accused of violating. …
A local official and four ethnic minority Tompuon villagers appeared in a Ratanakkiri court on Friday to face accusations of land-grabbing and protesting against a private company that purchased their land in 2007, authorities said yesterday.
Rocham Pheun, an assistant to the chief of Keh Chung commune in Bakeo district, told the Post that the provincial court put out 15 warrants, summonsing himself and 14 other villagers to court after the company filed a complaint, though only four villagers appeared. …
The company is listed in court documents as Ly Sokkim Co, Ltd, though a Ministry of Commerce database does not list any registered business under that name. …
Employees at a Taiwanese-owned shoe factory in Kompong Speu province where two workers were killed when one of the building’s floors collapsed on Thursday have been ordered back to work today, despite ongoing concerns from labor activists about the building’s safety.
While conceding that some parts of the building—including the section that collapsed—had been built without a permit and were potentially unstable, an official for the provincial department of land management said Sunday that workers could safely return to work as “warning signs” would be erected to avert employees from parts of the factory still deemed unsafe.
“There are two illegal extensions to the building, which have to be removed,” said Mam Narey, bureau chief of the provincial construction department. “We cannot keep them because it is very dangerous for the workers.” …
The mezzanine level of the Wing Star Shoes Co. Ltd. in Kong Pisei district collapsed on Thursday morning, crushing workers who were arriving at the factory. According to the authorities, steel beams holding up the concrete flooring buckled under the weight of boxes of shoes due to shoddy construction done without a permit. …
“Safe and ethical working conditions are of paramount importance to ASICS. We have launched our own investigation into the cause of the incident in full cooperation with the relevant authorities. In addition to our ASICS staff already on site, two representatives plus related people from ASICS corporation headquarters will travel to Phnom Penh and personally evaluate progress of investigations,” said Katsumi Funakoshi, general manager of public relations department for ASICS.
“The decision to re-open or continue to work with this factory would be considered after the result of investigation by ourselves, by the third party and by the government,” he added. …
“Just like in a house, when you build a small roof for the dog, and if that small roof collapses, you will not suggest that the whole house is going to collapse,” [ Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia chairman] Mr. [Van] Sou Leng said. …
He also said that the paying of money to families of the dead and injured over the weekend was “insulting.”
“There’s the criminal aspect of an illegal construction that resulted in the death of workers,” Mr. Welsh said. “To think that they are offering money to families over the weekend to prevent the criminal suit is ludicrous and frankly should not stand.”
According to Ms. Hour, the factory representative, nine of the injured workers who went to Calmette Hospital had received $1,700 each. Victims with minor injuries at the district referral hospital received $550 each, she said.
“For each dead victim, the factory donated $6,500 to each family to hold the funeral,” Ms. Hour said. “We wanted to negotiate compensation with them but right now, they don’t want to talk. They need time.” …
The trade commissioner and foreign affairs representative of the European Union (E.U.) have turned down a request from 13 members of the European Parliament that they immediately investigate Cambodia’s much criticized economic land concessions, but said they were monitoring the issue closely.
In a March letter to Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht and the E.U.’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Catherine Ashton, the lawmakers asked for an immediate investigation into the concessions, which they accuse of a raft of human rights abuses. They also asked that if the investigation corroborated their claims that the E.U. suspend the duty free access Cambodian exports currently enjoy to Europe under the Everything But Arms trade scheme—part of the E.U.’s Generalized System of Preferences (GSP).
Their request followed a resolution to the same effect passed by the entire European Parliament in October. …
The commission currently requires that human rights violations be “serious and systematic” before it launches an investigation that could strip a country of GSP benefits. In a report on Cambodia’s land concessions last year, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights to the country, Surya Subedi, said that rights violations tied to the concessions were “serious and widespread.” …
While garments make up most of the trade, the E.U. has come under particular fire for giving duty free access to Cambodian sugar due to the rights abuses alleged at a pair of Koh Kong province plantations growing the commodity. Hundreds of local families accuse the plantations of stealing their farms, sometimes violently, and offering them little to no compensation. …
Unions representing more than 15,000 members have called for justice for three women ahead of round two of legal action against their alleged shooter, deposed Bavet town governor Chhouk Bandith.
Bandith, who is accused of shooting the three workers during a protest at a factory in Svay Rieng province in February last year, will face the provincial court once again tomorrow on charges of causing “unintentional violence”.
The Cambodian Labour Confederation and the Cambodian Confederation of Unions issued a statement on Friday urging the court to convict Bandith, send him to prison and make him pay compensation. …
The Japanese athletics brand ASICS said Friday that it would push its four Cambodian sub-contractors to join a programme that monitors conditions in garment and shoe factories. …
“We will strongly request to our sub-contractors in Cambodia to sign up to this programme,” Katsumi Funakoshi, ASICS spokesman, said by email. …
The Better Factories Cambodia programme, which is voluntary, was set up in 2001 and is run by the International Labour Organization. It monitors factories making clothing and shoes for export to ensure they comply with a range of issues, such as fire safety, working conditions and prompt payment of wages.
Thursday’s accident showed the programme should also monitor factory construction, its chief technical adviser, Jill Tucker, said. …
She called on the hundreds of buyers from other countries that source from Cambodia, including Japan, to take responsibility for the factories where their products were made and join the initiative. …
Labor rights activists and a government official accused the International Labor Organization’s Better Factories Cambodia program of ineffectiveness in its monitoring of factory conditions following a deadly ceiling collapse on Thursday at a shoe factory in Kompong Speu province.
Moeun Tola, labor program head of the Community Legal Education Center, a labor rights group, said that Better Factories Cambodia had failed workers by not disclosing the names of factories that flout the country’s laws on factory health and safety. …
In February, a team of Stanford University Law School researchers published a report titled Monitoring in the Dark, charging that the lack of transparency in the Better Factories program had actually set back garment industry standards for Cambodian workers, compared to their counterparts in China, Indonesia and Vietnam.
The researchers also said that the ILO’s “confidential reporting practice” reduces incentives for factory owners and international brands to improve working conditions in Cambodian factories. …
Authorities yesterday said the ceiling collapse in the Wing Star Factory-which produces running shoes for the Japanese spots brand Asics-was due to dangerous building practices. …
Jill Tucker, technical adviser for Better Factories Cambodia, said her program did not monitor the Wing Star factory “in any capacity,” as the monitoring of footwear factories by the ILO program only started last year. …
Regarding the ILO’s decision not to name factories that flout safety regulations, Ms. Tucker defended the way the program operates.
“We are in the process [of] taking programmatic steps toward publicly releasing some non-compliance information and the name of the factory it is connected to,” she said.
The Better Factories program also does not monitor factory construction standards, although Ms. Tucker said that issues such as electrical wiring, overloading on platforms and pathway obstructions are recorded. …
AEON Microfinance (Cambodia) Co, part of Japan-based AEON Group, said sales by instalment for electrical appliances and motorbikes increased by 715 per cent in the first quarter of 2013 year on year, a trend industry experts say will grow further with increasing demand for electronics.
Started in December 2011, loan disbursement reached $2.5 million with 5,000 new customers in the first quarter of this year, compared to $343,000 in the same period of 2012, managing director Daisuke Maeda told the Post yesterday.
“Smartphones and PCs are the most popular, followed by motorbikes,” he said. …
The total loan portfolio of AEON Microfinance (Cambodia) at the end of the first quarter this year was about $4 million, with 6,500 customers, Daisuke Maeda said. …
The government wants to play a bigger role in helping local businesses remain competitive and, to this end, the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy (MIME) has launched a new award to recognise companies that have achieved high produc-tivity standards.
Ten companies will be awarded in September this year under the initiative, called the 5S Productivity Award. 5S is a Japan-based workplace organisation method – which will also be used as judging criteria – focusing on increasing efficiency and safety through methods such as “sorting”, or eliminating unnecessary processes, and “standardising”, or keeping procedures simplified. …
In the petition to the National Road Administration, Deputy Director of the HCM City Department of Transportation – Mr. Duong Hong Thanh, reported that at the time the Vietnam-Cambodia agreement on land transportation took effect, only 40 cars of each country were allowed to cross the border. However, the number of vehicles has increased to 450, with a lot of problems. …
Through Cambodian-managed agents and companies in Vietnam, these cars transport Vietnamese passengers for free from Vietnam to Cambodia to gamble. Cambodian buses also transport Vietnamese traveler within the territory of Vietnam. …
The deaths of at least two Cambodian workers and injuries sustained by 10 colleagues at a shoe factory southwest of Phnom Penh once more shine a light on conditions in the global garment manufacturing industry.
Thursday’s accident at the Wing Star Shoe factory in the Cambodian capital took place when a section of ceiling collapsed onto a group of several dozen workers. The factory, which has 7,000 staff, is contracted to manufacture shoes for Japanese athletics brand ASICS. …
Dave Welsh, the country director at the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, a labour group, visited Wing Star on Thursday and said it looked as though the ceiling at the Taiwanese-owned factory had been “badly overloaded” with materials. …
Garment and shoe manufacturing is now a pillar of Cambodia’s economy: Exports last year, most of which went to the European Union and the United States, brought in 4.6 billion US dollars.
The industry is also the largest formal employer with more than 350,000 workers. …
[Secretary-general of Garment Manufacturers' Association in Cambodia Ken Loo] was quick to separate what happened in Cambodia with the disaster in Bangladesh, and said the ceiling collapse was not indicative of a systemic problem: instead the deaths and injuries at Wing Star, which is a GMAC member, looked more like the consequence of shoddy construction. …
Jill Tucker, the BFC’s chief technical adviser, said although Thursday’s accident was uncommon it had highlighted the need for factories to adhere to building standards too. …
Prime Minister Hun Sen said Wednesday that he hoped land being registered to rural families as part of the government’s nationwide land-titling program would be used to cultivate rubber trees in order to help the country compete with Vietnam as the world’s third-largest rubber exporter. …
Speaking at the opening of a $26 million rubber plantation and processing factory in Stung Treng province, Mr. Hun Sen said that by utilizing some of the 2 million hectares of land that has been registered under his titling program, Cambodia could reach its target of 840,000 hectares of rubber plantations within five years. …
Presently, there are 280,000 hectares of land planted with rubber trees, 118,000 of which is inside ELCs, while another 107,600 is on small-scale farms, Mr. Hun Sen said, adding that about 1 million of the approximately 1.5 million hectares of land that has been leased to private companies as ELCs are registered as rubber plantations. …
Despite its growing rubber industry, much of Cambodia’s rubber is transported as liquid resin over the border to Vietnam to be processed, meaning Cambodia looses out on much of the value-added exports once the rubber has been processed.
A recent string of disasters rocking Bangladesh’s garment industry has highlighted its factories’ shocking safety record, and stoked optimism that giant fashion brands will flock to move their orders to countries like Cambodia.
But Cambodia’s garment industry has not experienced any major deluge of business so far, industry insiders said, and some even believe this may remain so for the long term, as Bangladesh tries to refurbish it image.
“So far, there have been no positive effects on Cambodia,” said the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia’s (GMAC) chairman, Van Sou Ieng. “There is just an increase in short-term orders to replace the non-delivery from Bangladesh [due to the recent disasters], but our factories have no capacity to take these up.” …
The Ratanakkiri Provincial Court yesterday charged two staffers of Vietnamese rubber concessionaire Hoang Anh Ratanakkiri (CRD) with causing intentional damage for allegedly setting fire to several homes belonging to a landowner with whom they were embroiled in a land dispute, deputy prosecutor Mom Vanda said. …
Ly Sok Ngim, owner of the plantation where the buildings were set ablaze, said she had filed a complaint with police seeking $200,000 in damages from Hoang Anh Ratanakkiri, which she said was the parent company of CRD. …
The beauty business in the Kingdom is growing rapidly as incomes are rising and the middle-class is growing, industry insiders told the Post yesterday.
In the first three months of this year, the Kingdom imported cosmetic products worth $9.9 million, an increase of 130 per cent compared with the same period last year, import data from the Ministry of Commerce showed. …
According to industry insiders, young Cambodians open to Korean culture and lifestyle are a main driver for the development of the industry. …
With the potential for vast state revenues from oil extraction and mining in coming years, Cambodia is currently failing to manage its nascent extractive industries according to a think tank.
New York-based Revenue Watch Institute yesterday launched its 2013 Resource Governance Index, which included Cambodia for the first time. It looked at 58 countries, assessing governments’ reporting practices, control of corruption and rule of law in the oil, gas and mineral sectors. …
“While Cambodia received a fairly high score for its institutional and legal settings, the nation’s very low scores in its reporting practices and enabling environment accounted for its low ranking in resource governance,” a statement from Cambodians for Revenue Resource Transparency, a local Partner of Revenue Watch says. …
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen announced in late March that the nation was on target to move from the status of a low-income to a lower-middle-income nation by the end of 2013, ranking it the 15th country that obtained high economic growth in the world in the last 10 years. …
Historically, however, Cambodia has relied on the role of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as the backbone of a sustainable economy. Generally in Cambodia when we talk about SME economic activities, we are in fact talking about micro-small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), as out of the more than 500,000 economic establishments or enterprises counted in the 2011 Cambodia Economic Census, some 493,000 of them employ only one to 10 employees. …
Growth in the number of MSMEs could help expand the economy, create more jobs, facilitate Foreign Direct Investment, and enlarge the tax collection base. The 2011 census shows that more than 500,000 economic establishments were engaged in economic activities, employing more than 1.6 million laborers or approximately 20 percent of the total Cambodian labor force. …
According to the National Institute of Statistics (NIS), around 72 percent of Cambodian enterprises are family-run businesses with one to three employees (2009). Out of 505,134 enterprises, only 3.5 percent were registered at the Ministry of Commerce in 2011. This means that the majority of enterprises are in the informal sector, effectively preventing them from accessing finance because banks and monetary financial institutions require SMEs to have legal status to be eligible to apply for a loan. …
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Wednesday inaugurated a rubber processing plant here, saying the factory would contribute to developing the country’s fast-growing rubber sector.
The 7 million U.S. dollar plant, invested by Cambodia’s Sopheak Nika Investment Agro-Industry Company, was built on the area of 9 hectares in Sesan district of Stung Treng province, about 455 kilometers from Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, according the company’s report. …
The report said the company received economic concessional land of 10,000 hectares from the government in March 2005 in order to grow rubber trees, and to date, the firm has invested 19 million U. S. dollars for rubber plantation. …
As of last year, the government had granted about 1.2 million hectares of economic concession land to companies for rubber plantation, the premier said, adding that so far, the country has planted rubber trees on the area of 280,350 hectares, and about 55, 000 hectares of them are old enough to be yielded.
Cambodia’s cassava exports reached 245,438 tonnes in the first quarter this year, a 47 per cent decline quarter-on-quarter, from 465,640 tonnes in the final quarter of last year, according to statistics from the Ministry of Commerce released early this month.
While most exports went to Thailand, Vietnam and China, where processing takes place, Thailand also is a major market for Cambodian cassava. Officials in border provinces and traders said Thailand’s restriction on cassava imports early this year and informal exports that have not been recorded are the reasons for the decline.
In Sovanmony, director of the agronomy, soil and improvement of agricultural department in Battambang province, a major cassava plantation area in Cambodia, told the Post yesterday that it is estimated that 30 to 35 per cent of the total exports go to Thailand without being officially recorded. …
During the first three months, the total value of Cambodia’s cassava exports reached $11.7 million, about 30 per cent of the total export value last year. However, the figure from the Ministry of Commerce shows that the export volume is only high during the first few months of the year.
