THAILAND: Migrant Workers Yet to See Legal Win Become Reality

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Apr 12 2004 (IPS) - Soe Tin bears the burden of being a condemned man in Mae Sot, a town along the Thailand’s north-western border that has attracted thousands of migrant workers from neighbouring Burma.

A photograph of this 35-year-old man, for instance, has been distributed to most of the 200 factories based in Mae Sot with a warning: Burmese workers could face expulsion from their factories if seen talking to Tin, a Burmese himself.

Such notoriety is the case for 20 other Burmese workers, too, who like Tin have been described as ”troublemakers” by an association of factory owners in the Tak province, where Mae Sot is located.

It is a price they paid for partially succeeding in a struggle for migrants’ rights that few Burmese workers before them had attempted – convincing Thai labour protection officials to order a garment factory to compensate the entire staff of Burmese for unfair wages.

Yet the taste of triumph is still elusive. The garment factory in question, the Thai-owned Nasawat Apparel Co, has still to deliver on the order to pay 16 million baht (421,000 U.S. dollars) to 257 migrant workers. The order was made in late March.

”We felt victorious when we heard the order from the labour ministry but we are not sure when the money will be paid,” a slightly-built Tin, who wears a pencil-thin moustache, told IPS. ”It is an important decision for migrant workers’ rights.”

Until December last year, when all the Burmese walked out of Nasawat Apparel in protest, each migrant worker was paid 50 baht per day (1.30 dollars) for an eight-hour shift, and overtime earned them eight baht per hour (about 22 cents).

Thai labour law, on the other hand, specifies a minimum wage of 133 baht per day (3.50 dollars) for an eight-hour shift and the overtime rate being 25 baht per hour (about 70 cents).

”We refused to continue working under these conditions; we had to protest,” said Tin.

But that was not all that characterised this factory as a sweatshop. The employers also deducted monthly amounts from an already low wage to pay for the work permit that the Burmese migrants needed, says Moe Swe, a Burmese labour rights activist.

”The employees could not refuse to work overtime, particularly when there were peak production periods; they were refused sleep,” added Swe, who heads Yaung Chi Oo Workers Association, a Mae Sot-based group of Burmese migrants.

There were times when women workers had collapsed on the factory floor due to exhaustion, but the managers ignored them, he revealed to IPS. ”There was no hint of taking the women to the hospital.”

The plight faced by the migrant labourers at the Nasawat factory – which produced jeans, shirts, shorts and skirts – is marginally different from what the thousands of other Burmese workers endure in the over 200 factories in Mae Sot.

Migrant workers have been drawn to this border town since the mid-1990s, as Mae Sot evolved into a centre for garment factories. Most of the Burmese who have slipped across the border have either fled the oppression of Rangoon’s military regime or were driven to find a better income given their country’s faltering economy.

Of the over one million Burmese migrant workers spread across Thailand, an estimated 50,000 are employed in Mae Sot. Close to 32,000 of them are migrants who have been registered by Thai authorities to work, like the Nasawat employees.

Last year, Thai human rights and labour rights activists – including the national human rights commission and the Thai Law Society – turned the heat on labour ministry officials in the Tak province to secure more worker-friendly environments for the Burmese working in, at times, slave-labour like conditions.

However, Thai activists like Pranom Somwong, are far from optimistic about change given the influence the factory owners have and the common attitude shared by the labour ministry officials toward the Burmese migrants.

Only one factory in Mae Sot is meeting its obligation to pay the minimum wage, said Pranom of the Migrant Action Programme (MAP), a group lobbying for migrants’ rights in Thailand. ”Often the factory owners force the workers to lie about their wages when labour officials visit to assess the conditions. They threaten them with deportation.”

Just as bad, she explains, is the lack of sympathy of labour protection officers toward the workers they are supposed to protect. ”They do not accept complaints because they do not understand the language of the Burmese and they do not have Burmese-language interpreters with them.”

Activists like Pranom have also detected cases of the labour ministry officials being more supportive of the employers than the workers during the customary negotiations that follow after complaints are lodged with the labour protection authorities.

Such a climate of labour rights violations stems from the limited interest Thai governments have paid toward the Burmese migrant workers. Currently, the only steps Bangkok has taken are the creation of a mechanism that grants Burmese the papers to work legally and guarantees they are provided with adequate health care.

The Thai government has also been lukewarm to attempts by the national human rights commission to put in place a legal framework that upholds the rights of migrant workers.

That despite the fact that migrants toil in jobs described as dirty, dangerous and difficult in the agriculture, fisheries and industrial sector to boost the Thai economy.

The earnings registered by the Federation of the Tak Industrial Chapter, a body that includes the factory owners in Mae Sot, offers a glimpse into the income raked in by an industry heavily dependent on migrant workers. Between March 2002 and April 2003, the Tak federation of industrialists earned 125 million U.S. dollars, its figures show.

”The Nasawat case puts pressure on the factory owners, because the labour ministry has made it clear that they are willing to enforce the minimum wage law,” said Swe. ”It has also made migrant workers more aware of what their correct wage should be and that they can struggle for it.”