Dear friends,

For any of you who are in Bangkok. I would like to invite you to join the program at the FCCT on 22 June. at 8 PM.

In solidarity,

Lek....

Broken Promises:

The Plight of Migrant Workers in
Thailand and Migrant Thais Abroad

Wednesday, June 22, 2005, at 8:00 pm

Cover charge for non-members: 250 Baht

Thailand, like Malaysia and Singapore before it, has developed a deep reliance on migrant labor, depending on workers from Burma, Cambodia and Laos, its much poorer neighbors, to take the badly paid, difficult or dangerous jobs which Thais now shun, and on the remittances sent back by the more than 100,000 Thais who have gone abroad, mainly to Taiwan but also to Korea and other places in northeast Asia, in search of higher paying jobs than they can find at home.

After years of well-documented abuses of migrant workers in Thailand, the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra  implemented a policy several years ago which sought to give foreign workers better protection while at the same time normalizing their generally illegal status through an official registration scheme.  It all sounded good in principle, but the real question is how well it has worked in practice.  Are  these people any better protected against abuse and exploitation  than they once were?  If t! hey are, how do we explain the recent horrific case of  a Karen domestic viciously attacked by her Thai employer?  And what of the Burmese hotel staff, construction workers and other migrants who were swept back into a form of oblivion by last December’s tsunami?

Looking at the issues from another point of view, what of the Thais who look abroad for opportunity, often paying Baht 150,000 – 200,000 in employment agency fees?   What conditions will they be subject to in their new homes and what, if anything, does the Thai government do to protect them and their interests?

Joining us to explore these and other questions will be:

 ·        Thetis Mangahas, an expert on migrant labor issues with the Internatoinal Labor Organization;
·        Chutima Chaihong, a Thai worker suffering abuse while employed as a household hand in Taiwan;
·        Junya Yimprasert, coordinator of the Thai Labour Campaign; and
·        representatives from World Vision, which recently published, together with Chulalongkorn University, the report, Migration and Deception of Migrant Workers in Thailand, and from Thailand’s National Human Rights Commission.
 

Migration in search of economic opportunity is a practice as old as settlement; its burdens are great enough without abuse and abandonment heaped on top.

 

 

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Junya Lek Yimprasert
Thai Labour Campaign
P.O. Box 219, Ladprao Post Office
Bangkok 10310

Tel: + 66 1 617 5491
Fax: + 66 2 933 1951

www.thailabour.org