#garment work

[taliweinberg]

[taliweinberg]

Anne Elizabeth Moore, Garment Work, 2010

photo: Elizabeth White

[chloeannriley]

The Buzz on Cambodian Worker Bees

My girl (or grrrl) Anne Elizabeth Moore will be happy about this one.

Pat Winn's latest post reveals that Cambodian garment workers are getting a raise. In U.S. dollars, that's a whopping $5.

But, as Winn points out, that's a significant amount for the workers, some of the poorest in Southeast Asia.

I bring ol' Anne Elizabeth into this because she has been campaigning for this cause for years. Moore, an artist/writer/activist actually went to Cambodia and lived, breathed and wrote about the Cambodian garment industry.

Here is a great excerpt from her essay, "Report from Cambodia's Garment Factories":

Meet the international working class—the faceless laborers that likely had a hand in stitching together your mid-range jeans, your jaunty parka, or your favorite silky smooth T-shirt: They are super giggly and sharing snacks in the back of a converted military pickup truck over their lunch break. In fact, they’re downright cute as buttons, and make about that, too.

Moore reports that 70 percent of of clothes produced in Cambodia are intended for sale in the U.S.

When I saw her over the summer, she was at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art to promote her exhibit "Garment Work," in which she completely rips apart a pair of H&M jeans.

Something we should all do more often.

At any rate, when Moore wrote that essay in 2009, the standard pay for garment workers was $55 per month. Now, with this increase, they will make $66 per month.

The raise, Winn points out, is most likely connected to a bizarre string of mass fainting that started in August and continued across different factories across Cambodia.

Are the faintings a result of poor working conditions? Long hours? Mass protest?

Then again, if you had to sew clothing for H&M all day, wouldn't you be sick too?

(Author's note: I was going through my closet to add some snarky photos of H&M clothing. Not only did I not find any Cambodian-made articles, I came to the conclusion that a significant portion of my closet was bred right here in the good ol' USA. -Granted the rest is from China, but you can only win so many wars.)