"Minimum wage won’t fix Cambodia’s construction sector", 30 May 2019

Currently, discussions about the rights and well-being of the working class in Cambodia are centered on the minimum wage. In his speech …, Prime Minister Hun Sen emphasized that the government had “received multiple requests from unions to set a minimum wage for workers in the construction sector,” a reference to the fact that Cambodia only has a minimum wage in its garment sector…

Sok Kin, president of the Building and Woodworkers Trade Union of Cambodia (BWTUC), welcomed the idea of setting a minimum wage for the construction sector. “Construction workers as well as individuals [currently need to] negotiate wages with [their] employers just like domestic workers,” he said, …, because the construction sector is mainly informal, regulating the minimum wage to improve the economic well-being of those workers is simply not enough…

Most Cambodian construction workers face unsafe working conditions. Many of them, especially those working on high-rise buildings, have been injured, and some have even lost their lives... Of the 1,010 construction workers surveyed by the BWTUC in mid-2017, 196 had suffered injuries – or 19% of the sample pool…

Leng Tong, director of the department in charge of health and safety at the Ministry of Labor and Vocational Training (MLVT), said … that construction-site owners were asked to open training courses for their workers on workplace safety so as to reduce the number of accidents. “The government is set to draft a number of laws and regulations aimed at reducing the number of accidents,” he said... 

… the government should consider is including construction workers into the National Social Security Fund, a national insurance scheme...