The leader of striking workers at six luxury hotels across the country rejected a new proposal from the hotel association on Thursday as both sides said they are still far from reaching a deal.
“Nothing has changed,” Edwin Bucher, general manager of the Hotel InterContinental, said Thursday night.
The strikers, who have been camped outside the six hotels since Monday, are demanding the hotels pay them at least 75 percent of the service charge, a fee amounting to 10 percent of the final bill charged to customers. Hotels say they can afford to pay workers only 30 percent of the service charge.
The Phnom Penh Hotel Association’s latest proposal to end the strikes, expressed in a letter to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor on Thursday, offered to pay hotel workers a fixed monthly fee if the service charge was eliminated, said Tek Ket, the association’s president. Workers would negotiate the amount of the fixed monthly fee with each individual hotel, he said.
Ly Korm, president of the Cambodia Tourism and Service Workers Federation, immediately rejected the proposal, calling it “a trick by the hotels.”
But, he added: “If they provide us $300 per month as a fixed monthly fee, we will accept.”
Most hotel workers earn a minimum salary of $85 per month, about $40 more than most of the country’s nearly 230,000 mostly female garment workers.
Minister of Social Affairs and Labor Ith Sam Heng and Thong Khon, secretary of state at the Ministry of Tourism, met Thursday at the Council of Ministers to try and broker a deal that would end the strikes. A Thursday afternoon press briefing at the Council of Ministers was canceled after foreign reporters showed up to cover the event.
“I don’t want foreign newspapers to cover the event,” Council of Ministers spokesman Khieu Thavika said by telephone.
Also, an Agence France Presse reporter said his tape cassette was confiscated by Khieu Thavika as he stood outside the room where Ith Sam Heng and Thong Khon were meeting.
Later on, Khieu Thavika said: “We never ignore the hotels because they have invested millions of dollars.”
Workers are striking at the Hotel InterContinental, Hotel Cambodiana and Raffles Le Royal Hotel in Phnom Penh, and the Pansea Angkor Hotel, Grand Hotel d’Angkor and Sofitel Royal Angkor Hotel in Siem Reap.
Ly Korm also alleged that the Hotel InterContinental and the Hotel Cambodiana were recruiting new employees.
“The hotel cannot recruit workers while the employees are on strike,” he said Thursday. “The hotels want to weaken the strike because they can continue operating when they employ a new worker.”
A recruiting advertisement for the Hotel InterContinental printed in newspapers this week said the hotel was accepting applications for “all positions, front and back of house,” including the front office, maintenance, housekeeping and kitchen help.
“We are not recruiting anyone because of the strikes,” said Bucher, who added that he told that to the unions on Thursday. “We needed to fill staff positions before the strike.”
