Chiang Mai (Mizzima) - Thai activists in Bangkok have revealed that more than 12,000 workers in Thailand have asked for help after they were affected by the ongoing financial crisis of the past three months. Several hundred of them are migrant workers belonging to neighbouring countries.
The Thai Labour Solidarity Committee and its network held a press conference on Tuesday, saying that the reported cases were workers, who had faced unfair layoffs because their employers claimed that they could not afford their wages, due to the current economic slowdown.
“At least 500 migrant workers have also reported that they had problems in accessing labour rights protection,” according to the group’s statement.
The labour group has set up 20 helping centers to receive complaints and try to find solutions for workers since January, in several provinces across Thailand, particularly in industrial zones.
The problems plaguing workers were unfair and late payment, decreasing working hours that lead to less income, and also not being able to access the government’s labour rights protection wing.
“Many employers claimed that they had problems due to the economic downturn, so they laid off the workers, unfairly without compensation,” the group added in its statement released at the conference.
Both Thai workers and those from neighbouring countries said they did not have enough information about their rights and could not get government support.
Women workers also have responsibilities of household expenses because some family members have less income or have been laid off from work.
According to Thailand’s Ministry of Labour, currently, about 600 companies are shut down or had partly laid off their employees, while more than 50, 000 workers were laid off across the country, since the crisis started last year. The Ministry also expected that the unemployed Thai population would reach 2 million, which is higher than that during the previous economic crisis in 1997-1999 which was 1.5 million.
However, in labour intensive industries such as agriculture, construction and fisheries, the demand for workers is still high. Previously, the Thai government wanted the employers to hire Thai workers instead of migrant workers, but the labour market needed many more migrant workers.
Recently, the Thai government announced that they would open a new round of registration for migrant workers from Burma, Laos and Cambodia for 400,000 workers to solve the labour shortage in the country.
The Thai government is currently in the process of expediting a nationality verification process for migrant workers, encouraging them to apply for passports and a visa at major checkpoints such as Kohthong, Mae Sai and Mae Sot, in order to control illegal migration into the kingdom and to persuade Thai workers to take up jobs commonly filled by migrants.
Wilaiwan Saetia, a labour activist from the Thai Labour Solidarity Committee, has urged the Thai government to set up a committee to investigate the employers, who shut down their businesses and treated their workers unfairly because some employers did not compensate the workers after they were laid off. They blamed the economic crisis that might not be wholly true. “Some of them may want to change production sites, but do not want to compensate their employees,” she added
