Last year, after the June Textiles garment factory in Cambodia burned down, the 4,000 workers—some of whom had put in 18 years on the job—were offered $20 each in compensation for losing their livelihoods. Period. 

That’s when the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center stepped in, working with the factory’s new owner, H&M, and through the country’s legal system, ultimately winning an unprecedented settlement that ensured they could support their families.

“The workers were unaware you could win an arbitration award,” said David Welsh, the Solidarity Center’s Cambodia program director, and "were stunned they could achieve such a victory."

Lots of great work like this victory takes place through the Solidarity Center, but with many of its program directors in far-flung places such as Algeria, China and Haiti, we don’t often hear of their experiences first hand. The June Textiles case is one of nearly 20 brought by the Solidarity Center last year, all of which the center won on behalf of Cambodian workers.

Speaking at a brown bag lunch here at the AFL-CIO today, Welsh described a country of 15 million people on the economic rebound from decades of turbulence following the brutal Khmer Rouge dictatorship, a country where more than 80 percent of the population is younger than 30 years old.

Not only is the working population young, but some 70 percent labor in the informal sector (jobs not taxed by government or included in the GNP), a group not currently covered by the nation’s labor law. In fact, very few are covered under the 1997 labor law, which also excludes civil servants—teachers and other educated professionals.

So as Cambodia embarks upon revising its labor law, the Solidarity Center is working with government ministers and others to push for inclusion of these two major groups of workers. The center also is trying to ease the nation’s lack of labor lawyers by hosting labor lawyers who spend six months in the country working intensely with Cambodian workers and their unions. 

Welsh, who previously served as Solidarity Center program director in Bangladesh and worked as a lawyer with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), is optimistic about the future role of democratic labor unions in Cambodia. Unions are in the news every day, says Welsh, and “unions are acting as leaders in a nascent civil society because they’re identified as the human rights element”—one often led by female workers.