Cambodia’s fashion leaders boost wages, skills amid export pressure

Cambodia’s textile and export leaders are pairing wage talks with skills training and factory-upgrade measures as the country’s garment, footwear and travel goods sector faces pressure to stay competitive. Apparel exports reached about $11.4 billion in 2025, and the broader GFT industry remained the country’s biggest foreign-exchange earner, making up 51.8% of total exports.

The scale of the industry explains the stakes. The International Labour Organization said Cambodia’s GFT sector included 1,810 firms in 2025 and employed more than 1.11 million workers, about 75% of them women. The United States remained Cambodia’s main GFT export market, and U.S. trade data put the American share at roughly 38% of Cambodia’s total exports, driven mainly by garments, footwear and travel goods.

Wages are still negotiated through a tripartite system that puts workers, employers and government in the same room. Cambodia’s Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training says minimum-wage setting is led by the Labour Advisory Committee under Article 357 of the Labour Law of 1997, a structure designed to keep pay decisions tied to industrial realities as much as politics. For a sector built on thin margins and fast turnaround times, that matters: higher labour costs must be matched by higher productivity if factories are to keep orders moving.

That is where the skills agenda comes in. The ILO and Cambodia’s Skills Development Fund signed a partnership to support skills development, workforce competitiveness and industry-responsive training programmes, a more practical answer than abstract sustainability talk. Better Factories Cambodia has been operating since 2001 to improve working conditions, compliance, training and productivity in export garment factories, giving the sector a long-running compliance infrastructure rather than a one-off campaign. GMAC says Cambodia’s first foreign garment investors arrived after the kingdom was reestablished in 1993, and the association itself was established in 1996, underscoring how deeply the country’s fashion economy has been built around export manufacturing.

The pressure will intensify as Cambodia is scheduled to graduate from least developed country status on 19 December 2029. United Nations and ILO materials flag skilled-labour shortages, youth unemployment, informal employment and climate change as the obstacles ahead. The current push toward wages, training and cleaner compliance is aimed at proving that Cambodia can move up the value chain without losing the buyers that still anchor its fashion economy.