We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now by Annelise Orleck

Author:Annelise Orleck [Orleck, Annelise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8177-8
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2018-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 27

“AFTER POL POT, WE NEED A GOOD LIFE”

DARK, NARROW STAIRS lead up to the offices of the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTU). The country’s largest federation of garment workers, it has more than sixty thousand members, most of them women. The long room is lined with metal filing cabinets flanking a scarred wooden conference table. The only English words in the room are on a wall banner that says: “Social Justice Is the Foundation of Peace.”

There are no lights on. The atmosphere is murky. Immediately to the right of the door are video monitors that show the stairs, the office, and the streets below. Why would a labor union office have surveillance cameras? Chea Mony, a slight, dark man with abundant hair, a soft, high voice, and a worried face, says he is not paranoid. In his life, state violence has been very real.

“Government people come here often to investigate us or observe us. In case there are any ‘accidents,’ we have evidence to reconstruct and document what happened. And we will have video to show who committed the crime.”1

Three officers in Chea Mony’s union have been assassinated—two in front of factories where they were organizing, one on a busy boulevard in the middle of Phnom Penh. One of them was his brother. Thirty-seven members of his union have been imprisoned. Chea Mony faces six federal charges. He could be arrested without warning.

On his forehead the veteran organizer wears a jagged diagonal scar that extends from his hairline across his forehead. He has been beaten by police clubs and rock-wielding company guards. He describes the men who beat him as goons; the English word jumps out from his long Khmer sentences. The goons, he says, were sometimes hired by garment manufacturers, other times by the government.

Every year on January 22, Chea Mony ignores warnings from the ruling Cambodian People’s Party and leads a march by union workers to the site where his brother, Chea Vichea, was gunned down on a busy Phnom Penh street in 2004. Chea Vichea was a cofounder of the Free Trade Union and of the Cambodian National Rescue Party, fierce opponents of the ruling Hun Sen regime. CNRP was deeply involved in the December 2013–January 2014 garment worker protests. Their prominence was one reason the government unleashed violence.

Educated in the Soviet Union in the bracing atmosphere of 1980s “Perestroika,” (reconstruction), Chea Vichea was one of the most important early leaders of a Cambodian garment workers’ movement that is admired worldwide for its courage. As he bought his morning paper on January 22, 2004, Vichea was shot in the head and chest by unmasked men on motorcycles. Six months later, Mony left his job teaching chemistry at the University of Phnom Penh to take over as president of the union his brother had founded. Between them, the brothers Chea ran the Free Trade Union for twenty years.

The Chea brothers are not uncontroversial in Phnom Penh. Some objected to middle-class intellectuals leading a working-class movement.

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