Four people were killed, 37 were injured, three have gone missing and 21 of the 23 people detained in last week’s crackdown on protests in Cambodia are garment workers. “What’s happened in the past week is a complete assault on trade worker rights and union rights in the most important sector of the Cambodian economy,” says David Welsh, country director for the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center in Phnom Penh.

A staggering number of strikes in this Southeast Asian nation indicates a blasé attitude in the garment sector toward worker rights, said David Welsh, country director for Washington D.C.-based labor rights group Solidarity Center.

A coalition of international retailers condemned Cambodia’s violent crackdown on striking garment-industry workers, while labor advocates criticized the response to the deadly wage dispute as weak. David Welsh, Cambodia program director for the Solidarity Center, said the letter failed to address the plight of at least 23 workers and labor activists have been detained in an unknown location since the protests began.