Legal pluralist and transnational regulation approaches to realizing the rights and ensuring safety of construction workers in Cambodia: Regulating multinational construction projects
Date
2025
Authors
Ly, Ratana
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Abstract
The construction industry in Cambodia has been growing significantly over the last two decades, except during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Royal Government of Cambodia has taken steps to boost this sector to expand the economy and develop the country. Many construction projects are large-scale, and managed by multinational companies. Many rural Cambodians who had been farmers have migrated to urban areas and cities to do unskilled construction work as they faced landlessness, environmental degradation, and a shortage of jobs in their hometowns.
However, workers frequently face abuses and injuries. This vulnerable group struggles to pressure employers and companies to provide appropriate protections and redress. A small number of socially conscious companies have implemented measures to enhance workplace health and safety. Yet, these conscientious efforts also meet with obstacles. Whether on their own or jointly, companies might, in response to diverse working conditions and cost considerations, modify their health and safety measures in ways that undermine any benefit to workers. The Cambodian state also has some laws to govern aspects of workplace health and safety. The existing legislation is inadequate; extensive reform and new laws to protect workers are necessary. Yet, a central problem is ensuring that state officers enforce these laws and that non-state actors consistently adhere to relevant state laws.
Turning to the literature review, numerous newspaper publications, some reports, and only a few academic studies have mentioned health and safety challenges faced by construction workers. The main actors that have been found to cause problems for workers are exploitative employers and companies. The literature also shows that employers and companies do not adequately safeguard workers’ health and safety, and that the state, by not properly holding employers and companies accountable, violates state laws. Some other studies show how trade unions protect workers, and some companies provide personal protective equipment to workers.
However, there is hardly any discussion of what or which stakeholders besides employers and companies are responsible for health and workplace injuries. In reality, workers and many other stakeholders are still new to using safety gear and standards; beliefs in gentle and mean spirits residing at construction sites exist; there is corruption; by taking these factors into consideration, there can be a change of narrative on whether employers and companies alone can prevent injuries and ensure occupational health. In addition, the discussion of other non-state actors and other legal norms, such as transnational regulation in operation, barely exists.
This dissertation applies legal pluralist and transnational regulation approaches to consider how state and non-state actors currently use state and non-state laws, transnational regulation, standards, and religious, social, and cultural norms to govern health and safety and, through the lessons learnt from stakeholders’ existing practices, how to search for a more effective mechanism. In addition, this dissertation applies a range of sociological and political economy perspectives to examine how legal norms work in practice, including in some multinational construction projects where contractors and subcontractors simultaneously engage with diverse legal norms. It also critiques formal legal institutions and processes. Moreover, my analysis draws extensively on my fieldwork. Through this approach, I hope to contribute to the field of legal pluralism and transnational regulation study in countries such as Cambodia and propose an empirically based legal solution.
This dissertation thus concludes that to effectively ensure the health and safety of workers, stakeholders should consider engaging in cooperative governance, including cooperative transnational governance: either public-private governance or private governance, as an additional legal regime. This transnational regulatory system has advantages, such as having diverse stakeholders in adopting, monitoring, and enforcing standards and holding members accountable. This dissertation provides three examples of transnational governance that stakeholders in the construction industry may consider: the Bangladesh Accord, the Forest Stewardship Council, and the Better Factories Cambodia. That said, the garment, construction, and forestry industries are of different natures, and they operate in quite different contexts; thus, a complete replication of any of these frameworks does not necessarily work well for the construction industry in Cambodia. Rather, a more effective and holistic approach is taking certain features of these transnational regimes, learning from their best practices and challenges, while taking into consideration the unique contexts of the country, different laws, relevant factors of the construction industry, and perspectives of diverse stakeholders, including vulnerable workers. It is also to ensure that the regulatory regime and the framework are feasible, functional, and sustained and align with international human and labour rights laws.
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Keywords
Cambodia, Legal pluralism, Transnational regulation, Multinational construction projects