"Barries to Representation: Freedom of Association in Cambodia", 4 June 2024

This report functions as a component of an ongoing project between CENTRAL, CATU, and C.CAWDU to document the extent to which Freedom of Association (FOA) has been contravened across Cambodia’s garment, footwear, and travel goods factories, undermining the country’s human rights commitments, violating the country’s constitution and labor law, and weakening the ability of international brands to undertake robust due diligence within their supply chains.

As the first report issued under this initiative, this publication evaluates Better Factories Cambodia (BFC) and whether their current processes appropriately assess and adequately report on employer-imposed barriers to freedom of association… BFC currently assesses working conditions in 703 factories across Cambodia, employing approximately 651,000 workers.

As part of this process, compliance reports can be purchased by brands and buyers, with summarized versions made available to workers, representative unions, and the general public on BFC’s Transparency Database.

Over a one-year period, our team conducted a series of interviews with union leaders and representatives from 14 BFC registered factories to assess their members’ ability to access and understand BFC public data as well as to evaluate the accuracy of the publicly available compliance reports in relation to FOA criteria. Our interviews with factory unions and workers revealed multiple challenges for workers in both accessing and utilizing this data. Workers also identified considerable inconsistencies between the data and their lived experiences. Despite perfect BFC scores on FOA criteria at all the 14 factories included in this study, union representatives at 10 of the 14 workplaces reportedly faced obstructions to FOA including verbal intimidation, threats, harassment, and blacklisting, severely affecting their ability to function…