Abstract

The “miracle” (World Bank 2009) of Cambodia’s recent development has been driven by the movement of labor. Beginning in the 1990s, when the first garment factories opened their doors, a trickle of migrant workers to Phnom Penh’s nascent export industry would soon become a flood, amounting to what is presently more than 300,000 workers employed in the garment sector alone (CCHR 2015). Taking account of the construction industry and the various other migrant employers, almost a million of Cambodia’s population of fifteen million people are now urban migrant workers (NIS 2010).