Better Factories Cambodia — Linking Trade Access to Labour-Standards Compliance

In 1999 the United States and Cambodia tied Cambodia's garment-export quotas to compliance with labour standards. The ILO set up Better Factories Cambodia (BFC) in 2001 to independently monitor and advise factories, and in 2009 the model was extended internationally as the joint ILO-IFC 'Better Work' programme, now also operating in Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Jordan and several other garment-exporting countries.

BFC combines factory compliance monitoring with training and advisory services to help owners fix violations and improve management systems. It today covers more than 660 factories employing over 645,000 workers, about 80% of them women.

An independent evaluation led by Tufts University economists (Brown, Dehejia and Robertson, NBER/RDW working paper, drawing on 2015-2018 data from 57 factories, 12% of BFC's affiliated firms) found that workers' reported ability to meet daily and hourly production targets rose by around 20% in more fully compliant factories, with cumulative productivity gains estimated at 26-31%. The same study linked improved wage compliance to a measurable fall in workers' reported exposure to sexual harassment.

The same evaluation found that the costs of higher wage and working-hours compliance often outpaced the productivity gains factories achieved, meaning that without better pricing terms from international buyers, factory-level gains do not automatically translate into net financial benefit — a caution BFC's own researchers flag directly.