Kampong Tralach district, Kampong Chhnang province, Cambodia — Chea Phally was the oldest daughter in her family at 43, and she carried her role with pride. She decided not to get married to better help her family at home, they said in June, while sewing at Can Sports Shoes factory to contribute to the income.
“She worked at the garment factory, she worked as a farmer, and she grew the plants around the house,” Chea Vanny, 72, said, gesturing to the canopy and lush rows of vegetables growing around the family home in Kralanh village. “She is my special daughter because my other children can’t compare to her.”
Chea Phally rode to work daily with her younger sister Chea Phalla, 33, a worker at nearby Sortics Alliance, both bringing home wages to support their mother and father, who lost his ability to walk in an accident 17 years before. Both women worked hard, almost never went out, their family recalled, coming home diligently each night to weave baskets for a little extra income. Neither daughter came home on May 23.
That morning, the family arrived at the scene of a road accident to find their oldest daughter already deceased, her head “under the tire” of the container truck that smashed into the open air garment truck. Lim Sokly, the husband of Chea Phalla, found his wife still alive on the concrete, next to one worker who appeared already deceased.
“She could only speak one sentence, ‘Bong please help me,’” Lim Sokly said.
So Lim Sokly picked up his wife to carry her through traffic to an ambulance. “I carried her, but when she arrived at the hospital she was already gone.”
The family of the sisters was tilling land for a new crop of vegetables when reporters visited on June 9. But their mother said this new season weighed down on her without two daughters at her side.
“It’s so much pain,” she said. “I can’t do anything. I can’t talk, can’t eat, and I can’t cry.”
“I lost my two beloved children. Imagine. The car comes and takes two bodies of my daughters.”
Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers are injured every year traveling to and from work, and some dozens die annually on the roads. On May 23, Cambodia was shocked by two fatal garment truck crashes on the same morning: one in Svay Rieng province that killed five workers, and a second in Kampong Chhnang, which killed nine people, including sisters Chea Phally and Chea Phalla.
Though the statistics are reported every year, and inch higher, garment sector observers say that unsafe commutes prevail, as the global garment industry squeezes ever more shoes, knitwear, handbags and other products out of Cambodian factories on tight margins.
Many of the workers who are injured or killed on Cambodia’s roads travel on their own motorbikes, but people also regularly get caught in road accidents in the private taxi services they take to and from work.
Workers get a benefit of roughly $7 a month to pay for their transport, one union leader observed, though sometimes they must in turn pay a higher fee: Kralanh village workers said they paid $10 per month to their driver.
Many workers hire shared taxi services that pick up in their neighborhood and drop off at one or multiple factories; sometimes the shared vehicle is a bus, but often it’s the uncovered back of an industrial pickup truck, where most workers stand for the duration of the ride.
The workers who survived the crash in Kampong Chhnang say they commuted with a driver from their village who brought workers to work in one of the open-air trucks. The workers interviewed by Mekong Independent unanimously agreed that they did not believe their driver to be responsible for the crash, instead blaming the driver of a container truck that crashed into their vehicle. However, the surviving workers noticed that they had suffered severe injuries as a result of flying out of their truck and slamming into the pavement.
Cambodia’s Labor Ministry has said that they intend to replace the flatbed trucks for transport with buses by 2027, and Labor Ministry spokesperson Sun Mesa said they were making progress upgrading vehicles and educating all people in the sector about road safety.
However, labor advocates say the situation requires investment — an investment that can’t come from workers’ monthly salaries that start at $210 a month.
Source Link: Mekong Independent