Cambodia is confronting renewed scrutiny of its chronic road safety failures after two separate fatal traffic collisions on Saturday left at least 14 garment factory workers dead and 93 more injured, most of the victims being women who make up the majority of the country’s garment workforce.
The garment manufacturing sector stands as Cambodia’s single largest source of export revenue, drawing global investment and orders thanks to its low labor cost structure. Most full-time garment workers earn between $200 and $300 per month including overtime pay, making the sector the backbone of the country’s industrial employment landscape. It supports between 800,000 and 1 million workers across roughly 1,900 factories that produced more than $15.5 billion in exports of clothing, footwear and travel goods in 2024, according to official data from Cambodia’s Ministry of Commerce.
The first of Saturday’s crashes took place in Kampong Chhnang Province, a location roughly 37 miles north of the capital Phnom Penh. A heavy-duty cargo truck collided head-on with an open flatbed truck that was carrying garment workers en route to their morning shift, the Cambodian Labor Ministry confirmed in an official statement. This incident alone left nine people dead and another 53 with injuries ranging from minor to critical.
The second fatal collision occurred just hours later in Svay Rieng Province, a southeastern region that is one of Cambodia’s major concentrations of garment manufacturing facilities. A passenger bus transporting workers to their shifts veered off the paved roadway and overturned, killing five people and hospitalizing 40 injured passengers.
For thousands of Cambodian garment workers, open-top flatbed trucks are the most common form of transportation arranged or utilized to get to and from factory shifts. These vehicles are rarely fitted with proper seating or safety benches, forcing most passengers to stand for the duration of their commute—a practice that drastically elevates the risk of severe injury or death even in minor collisions.
In the wake of Saturday’s back-to-back tragedies, the Labor Ministry released a statement saying it was “deeply shocked by two horrific traffic accidents that occurred simultaneously,” and issued a formal appeal for strict compliance with national traffic laws to prevent similar deadly incidents in the future. Current data from the Cambodian Transport Ministry shows that traffic accidents killed 1,467 people across the country in 2025, cementing road crashes as the leading cause of accidental death in this Southeast Asian developing nation, a crisis that has persisted for decades without comprehensive systemic reform.