Cambodian shelter collapse: Where were the unions?

No union activist has accepted any responsibility for the Top World collapse on May 21 – although all the relevant information had been known to union members long before.

Perhaps more importantly, none of the unions’ uncritical supporters in the world’s media has even asked why Cambodia’s hundreds of garment industry unions took no action about what was going on at Top World.  But all uncritically continue to peddle the myth that greater union involvement will solve the problems of garment factories.

Cambodia’s recent accidents in garment and shoe factories have provoked two new controversies that had not been part of the debates after the earlier disasters in Bangladesh:

-          The role of the Better Factories Cambodia (BFC) project. Operated by the UN’s International Labour Organisation and  the World Bank, but largely funded by the US government, the BFC has been criticised for not having inspected Wing Star and for having inspected Top World, but apparently not noticing anything wrong

-          The role of H&M. Garments for H&M, it now transpires, had been manufactured recently at Top World – even though Top World does not appear on H&M’s published supplier list.

Neither of these new controversies does any credit to the role of Cambodian trade unions, or their mouthpieces abroad.

Unlike the situation in Bangladesh, unions in Cambodia are legal, and ubiquitous. It is common for more energy to be expended in a straightforward Cambodian industrial dispute on squabbles between unions than between workers and management, though Cambodian union leaders always insist this squabbling is caused by the other union’s political masters.

As a result, unions in Cambodia are perfectly capable of expressing concerns about working conditions – and readers of The Source will know they frequently do.

Unions are an integral part of the Better Factories Cambodia management and supervisory systems. BFC had a real problem with Wing Star: Wing Star had not joined the BFC programme, and the claim by ASICS management that it now wants its Cambodian suppliers to join the BFC programme must take some kind of award for the most deceitful claim ever made even by a Japanese garment brand. Wing Star is a joint venture between ASICS and a Taiwanese partner: ASICS was responsible for the decision not to join BFC in the first place.

By comparison with ASICS' outright dishonesty and irresponsibility, Cambodian unions’ errors at Wing Star were close to trivial. But none of the unions at Wing Star made any representation about the overloaded balcony whose collapse led to the May 16 deaths. And no union representative on the BFC programme management made any comment on the Top World factory audits. BFC claim the shelter that collapsed at Top World had been previously used for storage: no union representative has denied this – and no union at Top World appears to have reported the change of use.

The revelation that H&M products were being made at Top World poses even more serious questions for unquestioning buyers of union propaganda - and the whole politically correct argument for publishing supplier lists. One of the very best arguments for publishing those lists is that they enable workers to whistle-blow the moment an attempt is made to manufacture at an unapproved factory.

H&M published its supplier list in late March, and Top World is not on it. Yet in a highly unionised factory, no-one appears to have noticed H&M garments were being made there, although the factory was not on the approved list.

Workers have a key role in ensuring all kinds of manufacturing quality – from seven-sigma adherence to production standards to ensuring safety procedures are meticulously followed. When it comes to safety, their role is especially important, because common sense ought to say that workers will be a great deal more motivated in getting out of a factory alive than any remote managers or advocates.

But that role works only if workers are organised and motivated to play their part: giving them a nominal role is mere tokenism. At its first test, the supplier list system failed at Top World because no self-appointed worker “leader” thought to explain its possibilities. Union representation in the BFC system failed to bring out the change of use in the Top World shelter. Wing Star unions paid no attention to safety – and union representatives at BFC did nothing to bring Wing Star into BFC inspection.

Safety, like quality, is everyone’s job in a factory. In Cambodia, unions appear to believe they exist only to demand more wages and sit on committees. If unions expect to be part of management, they have to start managing.