THAILAND: Discrimination Makes Work Environment Hostile Terrain

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, May 14 2003 (IPS) - For women and tribal communities, the work environment in Thailand continues to be hostile terrain due to overt and covert forms of discrimination, say experts.

It is common for women to retire before their male counterparts in the same offices and for women to receive less wages than their male colleagues employed for the same task, they add.

For tribal communities, discrimination begins in another realm – being treated by the Thai state as being ”un-Thai” and hence dismissed as those who cannot legally secure employment, they reveal.

The comments were made here Wednesday during a discussion on the scale of discrimination faced by workers in Thailand. It accompanied the local launch of a report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on discrimination that employees endure globally, titled ‘Time for Equality at Work’.

”Equality cannot be gained on laws alone. There is a problem with enforcement,” said Vitit Muntarbhorn, professor of law at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. ”Enforcement is never strict. Equal pay is not a reality,” although Thailand has ratified the ILO convention on equal remuneration.

Maternity leave for women is still to be recognised as a right of a working woman, added Naiyana Supapeung, a member of the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand. ”Employers should recognise this right.”

Discriminatory hiring practises also expose the burdens women face, she pointed out, with some women having to provide documents about their personal histories that men are not required to submit.

To find work in Thailand – often labour that is dirty and dangerous – members of the hill tribe communities living in the northern regions cannot use to their advantage the fact that they were born in this South-east Asian country.

”To get work, they have to take on a new identity, as an illegal worker from Cambodia or Laos or Myanmar (or Burma),” said Wiwat Tami of the Assembly of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of Thailand, a non-governmental organisation (NGO).

This is because the Thai government has informed the 300,000 people belonging to the hill tribe communities who have received temporary residence permits that they can stay but cannot work.

”The government has no policy about the hill tribe people working,” said Wiwat. ”If they get a job, it is considered illegal. The state does not want to acknowledge their existence.”

Consequently, the hill tribe people seek work in the informal sector, he added. ”And even then, they cannot go to another district without permission, which lasts for 10 days.”

However, the ILO report, which was launched globally on Monday, has named Thailand as one of 10 countries working toward the ratification of the U.N. labour agency’s Convention No. 111, which seeks to end discrimination at work. Currently, 158 countries have ratified this convention.

In addition, the report acknowledges the gains made by Thai women in the aftermath of the 1997 economic crisis that swept through East Asia. Since 1997, women have been able to secure ”new occupational skills, such as commercial cooking, computers and electronic, where the participation of men and women is more equal”.

Prior to the 1997 financial meltdown, ”the skills that women tended to learn in public and private training institutions reproduced gender stereotypes and strengthened sex segregation, through care-based and entry-level, service based courses,” it added.

Typical of such jobs included child and elderly care, traditional Thai massage, office assistance and hotel services, the report noted.

According to the report, there was a 12 percent drop in the number of women in the labour market from 1990 to 2000, the latest period surveyed.

What is often lost in this picture is the growing number of women who make up the informal labour sector, says Rakawin Leechanavanichpan of Homnet Thailand, a NGO that lobbies for rights of women in the informal sector.

The women in this sector, who are self-employed or pursue home-based occupations, have ”little bargaining power,” she says. ”They are victims of a new form of discrimination arising out of globalisation.”

Of the 23 million who make up Thailand’s women labour force, some 13 million are involved in the informal sector, she estimates. ”There are no legal provisions to organise and to struggle for their rights.”

Home-based workers suffer by not having direct employer-employee relations, says Lucy Lazo of the United Nations Fund for Women (UNIFEM). ”The labour administrations in countries focus on the wage worker, not the home worker in the informal sector.”

Nonetheless, she felt that organisations like Homnet are challenging the status quo by bringing together the separated and widely spread-out women in the informal sector to lobby in unison.

The regional Homnet South-east Asia is a case in point, she added. It is networking to get ”social protection and equality for the home-based women workers.”