"W&D meeting fails to resolve dispute", 20 March 2019

A meeting supervised by the Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training between representatives of the W&D Cambodia garment factory and around 1,000 sacked workers failed to find a resolution to end the three-month labour dispute …, said Hem Hoeurn, a senior ministry official.

The workers’ representatives demanded factory owners unconditionally reinstate the fired staff to their previous positions, Hoeurn told …, while the owners cited legal frameworks and accused the workers of not following the Arbitration Council’s orders and ultimately those of the Phnom Penh Municipal Court…

Saing Chanry, one of six workers’ representatives permitted at the meeting, told … afterwards that agents for the factory did not regard them as true representatives of the workers.

“The factory said we [representatives] had incited [the workers] to participate in the protests, even though this is untrue. All of us were workers, there was no one then acting as a representative. At our previous demonstration, we demanded the factory give us seniority indemnity…

She said more than 100 of the 1,104 fired factory workers have continued to protest in front of the factory demanding their jobs back.

W&D Cambodia lawyer Taing Meng told … that he had tried to inform workers not to demand anything outside the confines of the law…