Yesterday, Public Works and Transport Minister Sun Chanthol, who is also the permanent vice-chairman of the National Road Safety Committee, told state news organization Agency Kampuchea Press (AKP) that the ministry would ban truck drivers without licenses from taking workers to and from factories.

This rule is already in the new Traffic Law, but has been ignored – as evidenced by the continuing number of garment factory truck crashes – that the ministry was forced to make a separate, explicit rule against this particular practice to force compliance.

According to AKP, there are more than 4,000 truck drivers across 14 provinces who ferry garment workers to and from various factories, of which more than 22 percent operate without a license.

Last month, 20 garment workers in Kampong Speu province’s Baset district were injured, eight severely, after the truck they were traveling in overturned. The month before, 61 garment workers in Svay Rieng province’s Bavet district were injured in a similar accident.

None of those involved in the accident were wearing seatbelts – as garment workers are forced to stand in most trucks transporting them to work – and it was unclear whether the drivers involved in both accidents had licenses or any qualifications to operate a large truck...
http://www.khmertimeskh.com/news/33512/ ... nge-again/

''of which more than 22 percent operate without a license.

My bet would be only 22% operate with a license. If that!

Where is this world coming to. Once it get's that bad I may as well move back to Europe.

hanno wrote:Whatever next. Range Rover drivers need a license? RCAF-plated cars will require to be driven by people with licenses?

not much use having a licence unless they have to pass a stringent test to obtain it in the first place

hanno wrote:

one_dolla wrote:not much use having a licence unless they have to pass a stringent test to obtain it in the first place

Or actually attend driving lessons. My better half got her license a couple of years ago and she was the only one that attended classes. All the other students dropped in, by car of course, registered and then came again at the end of the course and picked up their licenses. The driving instructor could not believe that my GF actually wanted to take all the classes...

And that is the real problem

Note that this thread was started in 2016, and not much has changed.

Many garment worker truck drivers lack licences
3 May 2018
A senior official of the National Social Security Fund said that about 20 percent of truck drivers for garment workers did not have a driving licence, while demanding more cooperation with relevant institutes to educate and strengthen the drivers’ ability to decrease traffic accidents involving workers.

Ouk Samvithya, director of the NSSF, made the comment on Monday while signing a memorandum of understanding with the Union of Youth Federations of Cambodia led by Hun Many in order to improve the safety of workers travelling to and from work.

“There are 4,362 truck drivers for workers, but about 20 percent of those drivers do not have a driving licence yet. This shows that workers face a higher risk of an accident when travelling from their home to their workplace and from their workplace back home,” Mr Samvithya said...
https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50485840/m ... -licences/

good luck with that, having a license do not guarantee good driving either

Still no change to the status quo. Garment trucks remain dangerous, and accidents happen regularly due to bad driving and overloaded faulty vehicles.

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
Updated: 7:30pm, 18 Jun, 2019
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...

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.
Full article: https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/ ... nt-workers