Southeast Asia
The WRC has an active garment factory monitoring program in the Southeast Asian across the key apparel-exporting countries of Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Our field staff in this region maintain close relationships of trust with worker organizations, document violations of worker rights, and aggressively secure meaningful remedy for workers.
Challenges Facing Garment Workers in Southeast Asia
Vietnam, Indonesia, and Cambodia are among the top ten countries globally exporting apparel to the United States. Garment workers’ wages in Southeast Asia vary significantly across the region from as little as $96 per month in lower-wage countries like Myanmar to more than $315 per month in higher-wage countries like Thailand.
Apparel brands have often shifted the sourcing among factories to lower labor costs and, as a result, the prices they pay per garment. These shifts in production often have resulted in the closure of factories that unexpectedly find themselves short of the production orders they need to stay afloat. Numerous factories in the region have been forced to close operations, often without paying workers their legally mandated severance. In many such cases, the WRC has been able to successfully press factory owners and brands to pay the severance owed to workers, resulting in the return of tens of millions of dollars which otherwise would have been stolen from them.
WRC’s Impact: Defending Rights and Advancing Gender Justice
Over the last decade, WRCs investigative work in Thailand has ensured that thousands of migrant workers—one of the region’s most vulnerable worker populations—have been compensated for stolen wages, freed from forced labor conditions, or returned to the jobs from which they had been illegally fired. Migrant garment workers assisted by the WRC have been among the only migrant workers in Thailand to win not only improvement in working conditions, but also a voice on the job, by exercising freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.
In recent years, the WRC’s investigations of gender-based violence and harassment at factories in Indonesia have led to the signing of the Central Java Agreement for Gender Justice, an agreement between worker representatives and a major manufacturer supplying leading international apparel brands, that has established landmark protections from workplace harassment for more than 6,000 women garment workers. Key provisions of this binding agreement include worker-led anti-GBVH education and training for factory employees, union-appointed and women-led anti-GBVH monitors in the workplace, effective grievance mechanisms and protections against retaliation, and prompt survivor-centered investigation and remediation of abuse.
In Cambodia, despite an increasingly restrictive environment for labor organizing and advocacy, in recent years the WRC has successfully defended the rights of workers to speak out against workplace abuses and organize independent unions. The WRC has won reinstatement and backpay for hundreds of workers and union leaders who were fired for associational activity, freedom and compensation for union leaders who were imprisoned on false criminal complaints brought by factory owners, and an end to forced labor situations impacting hundreds of workers.
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News from SouthEast Asia
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