Thai workers reject the jobs of migrants

Thai workers reject the jobs of migrants

The Thai government is being forced to backtrack on a ruling to replace migrant workers with nationals. Thais don't want dangerous, low-paid jobs and the Myanmar people, who have fled a situation even worse, won't go home. Sandy Barron reports from Bangkok.

BANGKOK: Jobs may be disappearing as recession bites deeper in Thailand, but potential workers are greeting one "solution" with an emphatic "no thanks".

A recent job fair advertising 20,000 rice mill positions attracted just thirty takers. Twenty of those quit after one day's grueling work lugging 50kg rice sacks in temperatures of up to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

The government has ordered employers to replace foreign migrant workers with locals, but a resounding lack of interest from Thais in "dirty, difficult and dangerous" low-paid jobs is forcing chagrined officials into a rethink.

Employers, struggling to survive, want cheap labor now more than ever, but even hard-working Thais are not prepared to do the kind of back-breaking jobs over long hours that are normally the domain of migrants.

"We'll be forced to close down if the government can't find workers for us," threatened Bumrung Kritpakorn, honorary president of the Thai Rice Millers Association. The millers are considering halving the size of rice sacks to make the work more appealing. Rice is the country's main export and a major source of foreign exchange.

Protests by 1,800 employers in a variety of sectors have resulted in widespread exemptions from the policy announced earlier this year to gradually replace around 1 million foreign migrants workers -- most of them from poverty-stricken Myanmar -- with Thais.

Around 200,000 migrants have been transported to the Thai- Myanmar border, according to the government, but observers say few actually crossed it.

Conditions in military-run Myanmar are so bad that desperate Myanmar people continue to risk the considerable perils of living illegally in Thailand.

Appalling working conditions in industries like fishing and garment-making, extortion and ill-treatment by corrupt officials and non-payment by crooked employers are commonly reported.

Aung Myin, 24, was a landless laborer in southern Myanmar before he sneaked across the mountains into Thailand with his wife and child two years ago.

His dangerous, poorly paid job on a Bangkok construction site is still a big improvement on portering for the Myanmar army, a grim job taken only by the most desperate or those who are forced into it. "I couldn't feed my family in Myanmar," he says.

But since paying off the broker who brought him to Bangkok, receiving no wages on his last job, and falling dangerously ill, Aung Myin is now deeply in debt to friends.

He carefully pulls down a section of his shorts to display a six inch scar along his left buttock; there is another on his groin, he says. Six weeks ago a charity worker discovered Aung Myin delirious in his hut on the construction site. A small infection contracted a month earlier had grown to the point where an emergency operation was necessary.

"Migrants are afraid that the police will catch them if they leave their workplaces to go to hospital. They don't speak Thai, and they don't know how the system works. So they stay away and develop health problems," said an aid worker.

Myo Win, another laborer from Myanmar, sighs when he says that his 12 year old son, Aung Gyi, has joined him on the construction site. The boy carries wood and iron poles for $2.50 a day. "The kids can't go to school, so the parents feel they might as well work," said Myint Wein, an NGO worker in Bangkok.

While life is tough and often cruel for the migrants, it still offers many a measure of hope they had lost in Myanmar. Some find decent employers and discover tolerance and kindnesses that surprise them. "Many Thai government hospitals will not turn away penniless illegals who need treatment," said Jackie Pollack, an aid worker in the northern city of Chiang Mai.

Now it looks like the government may not after all carry out its threat to turn a million "guests" away either. That will quieten the barrage of pressure from employers -- but it will also turn the spotlight firmly back on the plight of the estimated two million Thais expected to be jobless by the end of the year.

-- Observer News Service