PHNOM PENH , Cambodia — Every Third World factory boss knows the formula for success: Drive your workers to the point of exhaustion and pay them as little as possible. If they complain, replace them.
But garment factories in Cambodia, one of the world's poorest nations, aren't gloomy pits of Dickensian misery. Instead, Cambodia is seeking to become the rare Third World country to develop economically while treating workers reasonably well.
Whether it succeeds might ultimately depend upon whether U.S. consumers demand more than low prices from their clothing stores. "The really big question is: Do consumers care?" of the International Labor Rights Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit group.
Few countries would seem a less likely worker champion. Under the radical Khmer Rouge regime that ruled from 1975 to 1979, more than 1 million people were literally worked to death in a crazed bid to construct an agrarian utopia.
Today, workplace conditions, monitored by the International Labor Organization, the United Nations agency that keeps tabs on factories here.
Last year, two labor union officials, including a member of the ILO's advisory committee, were killed in what Amnesty International suggests were politically motivated shootings. The industry is free of the forced labor, sexual harassment and child labor abuses habitually seen in the Third World, according to the ILO.
“The work is tedious” say the women but that unlike the equally tedious chores in their villages, the factory provides reliable income.