Horrific accident puts Cambodia’s poor travel conditions for garment workers in spotlight
- Five female garment factory workers had their arms severed clean off as they were commuting to work in an overloaded open-back truck
- Up to 70 women can be packed in like cattle on a single truck, with drivers, often young and undertrained, under pressure to carry as many people as possible
Lang Srey Sar, 19, looks at the place where her arm was just a matter of weeks ago. The Cambodian factory worker lost the limb in a gruesome road accident. “Missing an arm … I look like a bird without a wing,” she says, sadly.
Srey Sar was one of about 40 garment workers on their way to their factories in an open-back truck on April 4 when it collided with a cement mixer truck that their driver was trying to overtake. Eighteen of the women were injured and five, who were holding on to the top of a metal frame, each lost an arm.
Roeun Kunthear, 31, was another of them. “I saw my arm cut off at the shoulder. Only when I saw it falling into my sleeve did I realise what was happening,” she says, talking to the South China Morning Post in her village in Kampong Speu province, about 50km (31 miles) from Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.
According to the workers, whose arms were severed clean off, an ambulance arrived at the scene 30 minutes later. Their injuries were so serious, however, that the local hospital was not equipped to handle the surgery required for their injuries, so they were taken to another hospital two hours away.
The garment industry is Cambodia’s largest private employer, providing jobs for up to 800,000 factory workers. Tens of thousands travel to and from work packed into open-back trucks. They are invariably overloaded, with up to 70 women crammed in like cattle, and many hold on to the metal frame to keep their balance. Accidents happen frequently.
The country recorded 4,853 traffic accidents involving garment workers in 2017, according to statistics from the Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training. Sixty-eight workers died and 683 were seriously injured. The number of accidents fell to 1,849 last year, with 40 deaths and 349 serious injuries. The ministry adds that 45.5 per cent of the accidents in 2017 were caused by truck drivers, while the figure for last year was 43 per cent.
