FROM THE GERMAN PRESS AGENCY, DPA

   (Phnom Penh) - Three people died and seven were injured, some seriously, after a section of ceiling at a shoe factory collapsed near the southern city of Kampong Speu on Thursday.

   All of those trapped under the rubble had now been freed, said Dave Welsh, country director at the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, a labour group.

   “This is a huge factory by Cambodian standards with 7,000 workers, but the collapse happened in a corner section,” Welsh said from the scene. “The number of fatalities could have been much larger.”

   The factory made shoes for the athletics brand ASICS, a spokesman for the company confirmed from its head office in Kobe, Japan. He declined to comment further until all the details were known.

   Thursday’s accident follows the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh last month that killed more than 1,100 workers, and which focused global attention on working conditions and safety standards in the garment industry.

   The accident in Bangladesh was blamed in part on overloading. Welsh said overloading was also the reason the ceiling collapsed on the Cambodian workers.

   Thursday's collapsed "highlights how bad conditions are for workers, and that this is not isolated to Bangladesh but is a regional and a global problem," he said.

   The garment and shoe manufacturing industry is Cambodia’s largest formal employer and its biggest earner of foreign exchange, worth around 4.6 billion dollars in 2012. Most garments and shoes are exported to the United States and the European Union."

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