A combination of overwork, poor working conditions and poverty wages has seen another spike in Cambodian garment workers collapsing at work - with workers even dropping dead on the job.
In a single week in July, over two hundred workers were admitted to the Prek Anhchanh Health Centre clinic on the outskirts of Phnom Penh after passing out while working in garment factories.
Two workers employed at factories located outside Phnom Penh died at the end of July. Seamstress Nov Pas, who spent nearly four years making clothes for brands like Gap and Old Navy, passed out at her post in the Sangwoo factory at 8am on 24 July 2014 and was pronounced dead in hospital an hour later. Garment worker Vorn Tha, 44, collapsed and died at the New Archid factory, which makes clothes for H&M, after he had worked a succession of long days from 7am to 10pm.
A third garment worker, employed at the Cambo Kotop Ltd factory in Phnom Penh, died in March.
Sokny Say from the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC) said: “2014 is remarkable because while we have had many cases of mass faintings in the past, this is the first year that people have died. We must not become immune to the fact that so many garment workers are collapsing in the factories. It can be a precursor to death.”
Jyrki Raina, general secretary of the garment workers’ global union IndustriALL, stated: “This sinister development of workers collapsing at work and then dying cannot go unchallenged. Poverty wages mean that garment workers cannot afford to eat properly and a lack of food, long hours and intolerable factory conditions are proving a lethal combination.”