Cambodia has benefited in recent years from rising factory wages in China that have pushed some apparel retailers to look for cheaper places to source their products.
One USCBC survey respondent said his factory raised wages by 20% from 2010, causing labor costs to inflate quickly and make retention more difficult due to an even more aggravated shortage of labor.
As one factory boss said to me last month, wages for factory workers in China are now five times higher than in Vietnam, so he's moved all his labour-intensive work out of China.
As we all know, the founder of the Ford famously doubled the wages of his factory worker in 1914, to the shock of other automobile manufacturers.
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There will be an aggressive narrowing of the competitive advantage China now wields in labour costs, the report predicts, as wages for Chinese factory workers rise by between 15pc and 20pc a year.
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In Dongguan, factory managers face the choice of increasing wages (which they have hardly adjusted for years), shifting to less labour-intensive production or moving to areas where cheap labour is more abundant.
On Oct. 1, the company raised the wages of its workers at its Shenzhen factory by about 66%.
And the wages Wessely pays are a good three times what the Poles on his factory floor make back home.
The arbitrage between Chinese and American wages that became possible in 1979 is only now becoming apparent to every factory worker.
At another apparel factory in Phnom Penh, workers staged a hunger strike and slept outside the facility this year to demand back wages and severance.
Naturally, turnover at the factory is high with an estimated one-third of workers coming from local staffing agencies and receiving even lower wages and no benefits.
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