"Ministry to merge labour inspection teams", 18 November 2019

The Labour Ministry is merging its inspection department’s team with those in three other ministries to create a single one to conduct checks on industries and factories.

Labour Minister Ith Samheng ... led a meeting with officials from the Industry and Handicrafts Ministry, Tourism Ministry and Environment Ministry in order to discuss the merger.

He said that the inspectors from all four ministries will be merged into an inter-institutional labour inspection team.

The merger is part of government reforms aimed at strengthening the Kingdom’s competitiveness and promoting economic diversification...

Mr Samheng noted that the ministry will form a working group to discuss the various functions of inspection teams from all four ministries and remove unneeded inspections from the list of priorities.

“We will prepare a new list of the inspection team’s function and its schedule of inspection,” he added.

... Far Saly, president of National Trade Unions Coalition, ... said that the merger of the inspection teams will be useless if it fails to pay attention to workers’ problems.

“Even if three or four ministries work together their effort will not be productive if they do not care to look into the needs of workers,” he said. “Previously, when there were teams from four ministries working on worker issues, bad working conditions still remained.”

Mr Saly said he expects all four ministries to help workers to have a better working environment and look into problems they face.