Do Cambodia’s Independent Unions Have a Future?

Late last month, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) published an extended status update on Cambodia’s beleaguered union movement. In the new report, it detailed the ways in which the Cambodian government has used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to jail union activists, restrict labor union registration, and block the right to strike in the country’s economically vital garment and tourism industries. 

“Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the government intensified its crackdown on independent unions, using public health and other arguments as ostensible justifications,” the report states. “Many employers adopted retrenchment measures, making mass layoffs for jobs that no longer existed, which facilitated the government clampdown on independent unions.”

According to the 97-page report, which was based on interviews with more than 30 leaders and members of independent unions active in the garment and tourism sectors, the Cambodian government and some employers have used various legal and administrative tactics to weaken the country’s independent union movement. HRW “found widespread violations of workers’ rights to register, form, and join independent unions at garment factories, a casino, and other places of business.” Pandemic-related health restrictions were used to thwart workers’ ability to strike, while mass layoffs or retrenchment in response to the pandemic was also misused to dismiss union leaders and other senior workers.

As HRW’s deputy Asia director, Phil Robertson, put it in a statement accompanying the report’s release, “The Cambodian government and unscrupulous employers used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to further restrict independent unions instead of protecting worker welfare and rights at a desperate time.”

Among its primary case studies is that of the Phnom Penh casino and hotel complex NagaWorld, which laid off 1,329 workers in April 2021, as COVID-19 tightened its grip on the country. This prompted unionized casino workers to strike, demanding the reinstatement of 365 dismissed workers as well as fair compensation from NagaWorld’s management. 

The strikes were met with the full force of the law. As the HRW report notes, “Authorities deemed virtually any strike to be ‘illegal,’ and police, non-uniformed police, and other security forces confronted strikers with excessive use of force, and forcibly removed them from picket lines onto city buses to transport them to the outskirts of the capital.” In January of this year, Chhim Sithar, leader of the Labor Rights Supported Union of Khmer Employees (LRSU), which led the strike, was arrested and spent 74 days in pretrial detention based on fabricated charges of “incitement to commit a felony.”

The report illustrates how the Cambodian authorities, like many of their counterparts in Southeast Asia, have adapted creatively to the COVID-19 era, using the crisis as an opportunity to deepen a long-running war against independent labor activism. 

There are several reasons for the Cambodian government’s allergy to sustained industrial action, the most obvious being that the manufacturing sector, where most union activity is concentrated, represents one of Cambodia’s largest sources of export earnings. Last year, despite COVID-19 lockdowns, the country exported $11.3 billion worth of garments, up some 15 percent from the previous year, which made up the lion’s share of Cambodia’s $17.42 billion in total exports.

Socially, the manufacturing sector also acts as a useful sponge for the country’s excess rural population, who have migrated in their tens of thousands to the cities over the past two decades, as the agricultural economy has stagnated and land holdings have concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. 

The growing urban proletariat has created a political challenge for Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). Workers migrating to the cities have escaped the control of the local administrators that for years have ensured grassroots support for the CPP government and in turn has brought them into contact with other political messages, including from labor unions. 

This is particularly threatening for the CPP considering that Cambodia’s independent union movement has historically had a close relationship to the country’s opposition parties. In 1995, Chea Vichea, the one-time head of the Free Trade Union, became a founding member of Sam Rainsy’s Khmer Nation Party, the precursor to today’s Candlelight Party, and garment workers appeared in large numbers at opposition rallies.

For all these reasons, the government has acted decisively to stamp out any hint of instability in the sector, or to prevent workers’ grievances from being politically mobilized. In 2004, Chea Vichea was shot dead in broad daylight in central Phnom Penh, in a killing that has never been solved. Other unionists have met a similar fate. 

Most have been pressured into capitulating, or into joining pro-government syndicates. The latter, which are often referred to as “yellow” unions, have mushroomed since the 1990s, producing a deep divide in the union movement between those friendly to management and the CPP government, and an ever-shrinking minority whose first loyalty is to their members. 

As HRW notes, government-friendly unions enjoy many advantages: They are freed from the country’s burdensome mandatory registration process, and the swiftness of their registration has led them to be “popularly likened to making a two-minute cup of instant noodles.” As Nov Chantha, a former leader of the Free Independent Trade Union Federation, told HRW researchers, “The authorities don’t want unions that fight on behalf of workers and support workers. They want unions that think like the government.”

These yellow unions have long been an important part of the government’s union-busting strategy. According to HRW, the government further strengthened these unions at the expense of their troublesome independent counterparts by ensuring that government initiatives designed to address the severe economic impacts of COVID-19 have overwhelmingly benefitted workers affiliated with the former.

As many Southeast Asian governments have discovered, public health measures offered the perfect pretext for shutting down public protests or otherwise tightening the state’s control on various forms of dissenting behavior and opinion. As a result, the future for Cambodia’s independent union movement is undeniably dim in the CPP’s age of connected capital. While independent labor organizers will continue their work in the face of all the odds, a breakthrough for workers’ rights will probably have to await the end of Hun Sen’s reign, and the emergence of a different and partially more progressive political dispensation.