A Food Factory Worker with 10 Years of Experience Turns Waste Picker
After holding a full-time job for a decade, Ream now collects cans and plastic bottles to sell for recycling. Photo: Ou Sokmean
- Ou Sokmean
- May 3, 2020 7:05 AM
After losing her job at a cookie factory due to COVID-19, Ream decided not to return home to Takeo Province but to stay in Phnom Penh and do waste-picking work. This only enables her to earn 3,000 to 5,000 riels (about $0.75 to $1.25) per day.
PHNOM PENH— The Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) has driven the closure of more than a dozen garment and other factories in Cambodia, leaving over 100,000 workers unemployed. Among them is a 49-year woman who has been forced to turn waste picker to survive.
Living in a rented room in a Phnom Penh suburb area surrounded by sewage, Nheom Ream goes through trash every day to find plastic water bottles, beer and juice cans, which she puts in sacks for sale.
“Since the Covid-19 outbreak, I have been jobless for nearly two months now,” she said in interview. “No factory or restaurant will take me as an employee.”
And yet, Ream has decided not to go back to Takeo Province as she is a single woman with no close family members who has been living in Phnom Penh for around 10 years.
During all those years, life has not really been bad, Ream said. But this completely changed with the arrival of COVID-19.
When the cookie factory in which she worked for 10 years shut down six months ago, she managed to get jobs as a mobile worker, going from one garment factory to the next and earning between $6 to $10 per day.
“This was enough to help me deal with daily expenses on food and monthly room rent, which costs $21,” Ream said.
But with more factories closing due to the COVID-19 outbreak, mobile workers like Ream—who are outside the garment production system—have also lost their jobs.
“I’ve tried to get a housekeeping job or other work at restaurants every day from 5 to 8 am and also from 4 to 6 pm,” she said. “I usually stand in line with other unemployed workers in front of the Canadia Industrial Park to get hired for work paid by the day.”
However, Ream has never managed to get those jobs. So she decided to carry a sack or plastic bag to pick up garbage from one place to another near the Canadia Industrial Park, in the Pur Senchey District and other areas of town in order to survive.
With trash picking work, she said she can only earn between 3,000 and 5,000 riels (about $0.75 to $1.25) a day as this kind of work has also been affected by the pandemic.
“I will continue to do this every day,” Ream said. “And maybe someday, there will be luck so that I can be recruited to be a worker.”
According to Heng Sour, spokesman for the Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training, more than 130 factories have closed or suspended production, leaving more than 100,000 workers jobless.
On April 7, Prime Minister Hun Sen announced that laid-off workers could receive a special financial support of $70 per month—that is, $40 from the government and $30 from the factory owners.
However, since Ream was a mobile worker and not listed as a garment factory employee, she has not qualified for financial support.
