To understand CLEW you should watch the Norwegian web series, Sweatshop Deadly Fashion. It is a good introduction to the social conditions in Cambodia and our students’ background.
The series is about three Norwegian teens who blog about fashion and are invited to go to Cambodia to see where their clothes come from. Once in Phnom Penh, they meet a female garment worker and spend the day with her learning about her life and staying in her small room on the floor. The conditions are shocking from a western standpoint. They get up at 5:30 the next morning and spend the entire day sewing one seam, over and over and over again. After eight hours of monotonous work, under strict bosses they learn that they just earned $3.00 for the entire day’s work. What is remarkable is that not so long ago they would have earned only $2.00.
The next day they are challenged to live on the wages they just earned. It has to pay for rent, food, transportation, and cell phone. If they were Cambodian, part of their wages would be transferred back home to help to support their families. They go to a western supermarket and the prices are off the scale. They then are introduced to a Cambodian market and learn how to economize on Cambodian wages and learn how impossible it can be.
They later meet a group of workers, one of whom is a woman who has sewn the same seam of the same style of garment for fourteen years. At one point you see a Cambodian woman holding a sign indicating that she made the garment she was wearing for 60 cents. You next see a western woman wearing the same garment with a sign saying she bought it for 100 euro. The series then highlights the struggle for a living monthly wage of $160.00 per month.
You watch the Norwegians realize how unfair life can be, how young women in Cambodia can be trapped by their circumstances. How they are forced into soul destroying jobs for wages that barely let the garment workers scratch by. And the cycle of poverty continues.
CLEW is intended to break the cycle of poverty for the young women from the provinces through the power of an education.
One of our newest students, Sokmeng, graduated high school in 2014. Her family are farmers from one of the provinces. There was no opportunity for her and so she went to work in a garment factory. She tried her best but became sick and had to return home and had nothing to do. As a result of funding from LexisNexis, CLEW was able to offer her admission into the program at the very last minute. There was only two days from her interview until she was admitted to law school and starting class the very next day.
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She explains that she wants to study law because of her experience in the garment factories. She notes the need to improve wages and better the conditions in the factories for the workers. She now lives in the CLEW dorm with nearly 30 other students and graduates all of whom have stories just like hers.
I discussed this series with a friend in Cambodia and she said that Cambodia doesn’t want fewer factories it wants more of them, but they want better ones. Microsoft won’t be setting up a factory there any time soon and Cambodia needs more not fewer jobs. There are responsible brands such as the GAP that are socially responsible. But not all of them are.
Over the course of this blog, you will learn more about our students and the social conditions they come from. You will learn about their hopes for the future. Watching the SWEATSHOP web series will give you a good idea of what Cambodia can be like for the poor and how important CLEW is to the future of our students.
It is a brilliant series and you should take the time to watch it.
Chuck G.