Factory Girls

If you have ever taken a look at the labels in your clothing I could almost guarantee that something you own would be ‘Made in Cambodia’, especially if your clothes are from H&M, Zara, Gap, American Eagle, Hollister, Abercrombie and Fitch, Ralph Lauren , Nike.......and the list goes on. I live in Kompong Speu province, and to get to and from the city we drive down national road 4. Lining this road are small market towns, and beyond that rice paddies and a LOT of very large factories. John once told me that there are 400,000 people (mostly women) employed in factories in our province alone. Driving down the road at either 6am or 6pm is a pretty amazing sight. There are thousands upon thousands of women out on the road, loading onto trucks back to their villages in rather alarming numbers... on the roof, out the back, hanging off the sides. These women work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week and earn about $70 a month. Working it out, it probably equates to about $0.25 an hour. If someone had told me this four years ago I would have been disgusted, and would have agreed with anyone who crusaded against these factories. Living out here has changed my mind completely. I don’t think that these factories are ideal, and I won’t be queuing to get a job any time soon, but I have seen how, in a poor rural setting, where there is no other work except rice farming, these factories are providing valuable jobs for women to support their families, and it stops them turning to the other main profession for women here: prostitution. Obviously I don’t support dimly lit sweatshops that uses slave labour, but most of the factories owned by the large companies are well regulated. There was a story a few years ago where the BBC was doing an exposé on factories employing underage people. The problem with this is that it is almost impossible to tell age, as everyone in Cambodia looks about 10 years younger than they are, and also the majority of people actually have no idea of their age. So they got access to this factory and wanted to interview some of the women who were prepared to tell them that there were girls under 16 working there. The women were paid $10 for the interview. To people who earn $50 a month, $10 is a big deal, so of course there were loads of women willing to say whatever was necessary to get their $10. I am sure there probably were a few girls younger than 16 working there, but the result of this investigation was that the company who owned the factory (I think it was Nike) got wind of this potential bad publicity and shut the factory down. A triumph against child labour they said- but what about the 4000 women who lost their job that day, and therefore lost their only means of buying food for their family. There are definitely two sides to every story, and until there is another viable solution, they are providing valuable money for people that would otherwise have none.