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This paper has six sections. The authors begin with an overview of the gender-specific trends in labor force participation, industry employment shares, overall shifts in wage employment, and gender gaps in wages and educational attainment in Cambodia. The authors continue with an industry-specific look at wage employment trends, which confirms that, while there are a few emerging higher-skilled sectors such as financial services, the manufacturing sector (and the garment sector in particular) still dominates and continues to grow in importance for women’s wage work. The authors then shed light on the vertical occupational segregation patterns within industry and show that even if women are not underrepresented in manager positions in the dominant manufacturing (garment) sector, this type of positions represent less than one percent of all manufacturing jobs. In fact, at present the only sector providing prospects for career growth beyond low-skilled work is the services industry, where women are underrepresented as managers, but overrepresented as professionals and clerical workers. Moving on to wages, we test whether the gender wage gap and the factors contributing to it differ by industry. Occupational levels and education seem to play a role in explaining only a fraction of the wage gaps in construction and agriculture respectively, while the gender gap in trade remains completely unexplained by observable characteristics. What is of even greater interest is the fact that there is no gender wage gap in manufacturing, while the gap in services appears only after controlling for education and occupational level. Importantly, in all sectors other than manufacturing, women with identical characteristics and similar occupations still earn significantly less than men. The authors also explore the extent to which motherhood explains women’s labor force experiences. The presence of young children in the household do not seem to explain the gap in wages. Nevertheless, we show that they significantly increase the probability that a woman will transition to non-wage employment, likely due to the need to combine household duties, childcare and work. Inspired by literature in similar country contexts, authors then demonstrate that the sizeable expansion of job opportunities for women in the garment sector has likely had a disproportionately negative influence on Cambodian girls’ retention beyond primary schooling (compared to boys), thus limiting their employment and wage opportunities. Because of the continued role that non-wage employment plays in women’s occupational paths, authors finish the paper with an overview of the trends in the sector, with a focus on non-farm enterprises, which appear to be slowly taking over agriculture.

This article focuses on the complex negotiations of critical workplace educators positioned amongst contradictory agendas and discourses in the workplace. While philosophically aligned with critical pedagogical agendas of transformation and collective action for workplace change, these educators perform an array of pedagogic articulations in everyday practice to secure their continued presence in the workplace. What becomes evident in these seemingly opposing articulations are various strategic political positionings of educators alongside their juggling of demands, attachments and inter-identifications with both learners and managers. The pedagogy that emerges challenges conventional binaries of ‘transformative’ and ‘reproductive’ learning. Dynamics of transformation and liberation as well as reproduction and subjugation appear to be interlinked, along with expanding nets of social relations that blur power hierarchies and spatial boundaries, in a pedagogy that ultimately appears to mobilise hope and agency among workers. The workplace educator works a delicate balance of these dynamics to survive. The argument is based on a case study of a garment factory in Canada in which an adult education programme managed to thrive for 17 years: both workers and educators were interviewed in depth.

This article explores processes and possibilities for critical learning in the workplace, with a focus on workers labouring in what are often exploitive and dehumanizing conditions. The argument is based on a study of work-life learning of women, mostly new immigrants, employed long-term at an Alberta garment manufacturing plant. It is argued that their negotiations of work conditions are nested in various areas of learning associated with everyday practices, small communities, labour organizing processes, and English learning classes. These areas are argued to have generated forms of solidarity emerging through learning about sociality, resistance, and personal worth. These solidarities appear to be configured by energies of both transformation and reproduction that are threaded together and generated simultaneously as women learned to survive within the system while supporting one another in a vital interdependent social network. The discussion explores how these dynamics unfolded, and their effects on how different women positioned themselves and their knowledge.

This presentation focuses upon a dramatic script created from a study of garment workers employed long-term at the Alberta-based garment manufacturing plant GWG/Levi. The study explored work-life and learning at work as narrated by these workers, many of whom had lived through plant changes over a period of 15 to 35 years. The workers’ recollections reveal powerful stories of resilience and individual ingenuity developed amidst numbing work conditions, as well as spaces of social learning that for some, appeared to nurture strength and self-worth. The drama, which was performed for academic and practitioner audiences, is reproduced here in full. The following pages provide background for the drama: the perspectives informing the project and its analysis, the study methods, the interpretations and themes from which the drama was conceived, and the process of constructing the drama.