TESTING: Messenger Band Cambodia, a group of female workers singing for their rights

Phnom Penh, Oct 1 (EFE)

The Messenger Band, or MB, started composing songs about what its members knew best the abuses experienced by hundreds of thousands of women who decided to leave rural areas in the late 1990s to work for manufacturers in urban areas.

“Wherever there is oppression, workers should make a stand, keep on fighting, solidarity will help us win. As the proverb says, it’s hard to break a handful of toothpicks, victory is never easy, oh workers, join the fight,” says one of MB’s most popular songs.

The singer and leader of the band, Vun Em, started to work at a factory on the outskirts of Phnom Penh when she was 16. She came from the province of Kampong Cham, in the east of the country, looking for better pay to help her family.

After sewing for five years, Em won an audition organized by an NGO and since then her life has been tied to the approximately 700,000 people, most of them women, who work in the textile and footwear sector in Cambodia.

“We started to learn from ourselves, from our lives, why we needed to study, and why we needed to share our stories, our working conditions and how we could change things,” the activist said.

Since the beginning, the band’s repertoire has included two other professions where women are vulnerable farm workers and prostitutes though MB’s songs are better known in the textile workers movement, which reached its peak after the 2013 elections.

The Messenger Band’s singers were with striking workers in January 2014 when officers from the muchfeared 911 Brigade special forces unit fired shots at the group, killing four protesters.

“Other members were in more danger than I was as they sang from the top of tuktuks to encourage protesters to stay together and not use violence,” Em said.

Female textile workers demanded that the minimum wage, which the government had set that year at $100, be progressively increased to $160 by 2018 to cover the basic cost of living.