KONG ATHIT
Using the Tack Fat factory as an example, this report looks at common hazards faced daily by workers in the garment factories of Cambodia. The report gives some idea about working conditions related to occupational safety and heath. As a result of the globalisation of trade, this statement shows how those workers suffered from the Multifibre Arrangement garment and textile quota system that supplied the US and EU until this year, and the ongoing special agreement between the Cambodian and US governments for garment and textiles production.
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SANJIV PANDITA
Mae-Sot is a town bordering Burma in the Tak province of Thailand. There are about 100,000 Burmese migrant workers working in Mae Sot predominantly in garment factories but also in the construction and agricultural sectors. The working conditions in the garment factories are pretty dismal; workers have to work for very long hours with very low wages and almost no rights.Many organisations working in the area have elaborately documented the labour rights and human rights situation in the area.
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By Sanjiv Pandita
Workplaces or Death Traps?
Work-related accidents and diseases are among the major killers of humans in the 21st century.
Most of us, however, do not realise the severity of the problem. If we take the International Labour Organisation (ILO) projection for the year 2000 (based on data collected in 1998), globally about two million workers die every year due to their work; the annual death toll from AIDS is about three million). This means a worker dies every 15 seconds somewhere in the world due to her/his occupation.It is not only the fatality figure that is a matter of concern, the number of occupationally-injured and diseased workers, who have to live with injury or disease,is also very high.
The same ILO report puts the figure of occupational accidents globally at about 270 million and some 184 to 208 million workers suffer from workrelated diseases
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6 September 2000 was just another working day for Nib Bahadur Sunar in Hong Kong. He was happy with his job at the Tin-Wo-Engineering company that was subcontracted by the construction giant Paul Y-ITC Construction Holdings, a Hong Kong-based company that has construction projects in seven countries in the Asia Pacific region.

Paul Y-ITC in turn was contracted by the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) that carries over two million persons every day.
It was Sunar’s sixth day in this job. As one of four ‘steel fixers’ he loaded 20 to 30 12-metre steel reinforcing rods into a rod-bending machine. Sunar’s job was to hold the rods while the machine bent them.
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By ED SHEPHERD
A man working next door to the factory when the fire broke out said, “I was upstairs in our work-room when one of the employees who happened to be looking out of the window cried that there was a fire around the corner. I rushed downstairs, and when I reached the sidewalk the girls were already jumping from the windows. None of them moved after they struck the sidewalk … Bodies were falling all around us … They stood on the windowsills tearing their hair out in the handfuls and then they jumped.” The above could be a description of recent industrial fires with hundreds of deaths and injuries in Thailand or China, but the statement was made on 25 March 1911 by the junior partner of Levy and Son, adjacent to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York, USA.
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