Worker rights

Tun Tun Win and his coworkers from Burma thought life was fine at the Thammakaset chicken farm in central Thailand, where they reared hundreds of thousands of birds for export to the European Union. The migrants clocked 20 hours a day for 40 days straight, shoveling ...

The Labour Ministry put forth a suggested figure of $148.20 for next year’s minimum wage as tripartite wage talks started on Friday, leading some unions to say that they would consider lowering their demand of $179 in hopes of reaching a compromise. Kicking off the negotiations, ...

ASEAN will deal with the narcotics problem by focusing more on healthcare and jobs for drug addicts as part of the bloc’s 10-year anti-drug action plan, says Justice Minister Paiboon Koomchaya. He was speaking on August 24 as he chaired the 37th meeting of ASEAN senior ...

Government officials and union groups on August 23 cast doubts on the findings issued by the industry body for the nation’s garment and footwear manufacturers, challenging its claim that mounting investor concerns had forced dozens of local factories out of business and resulted in a sharp ...

Among nearly 46 million people living and working in slave-like conditions worldwide, an estimated 9,200 are in Singapore, according to a global index on 167 countries compiled by a human rights group. The lower the ranking, the less prevalence of “modern slavery” in a country. The ...

The government’s Cambodian Human Rights Committee on August 9 sent a request to its counterpart in Thailand to help push the Thai government to implement safety measures to protect Cambodian fishermen working in Thailand in often slave-like conditions, a request advocates said yesterday should have been ...

Meeting at the capital’s Sunway Hotel, union organisers from sectors as varied as construction, food services, tourism and manufacturing discussed a variety of approaches – from a flat minimum wage that would span all industries to a more measured sector-by-sector approach – to push on ...

The dream of opening a business back in Myanmar is what brought Moe Moe to Singapore two years ago. What she did not know is that it would be nine months before she received her first salary. For the first nine months everything went to the ...

Thai employers are reluctant to attract media coverage focusing on the region’s docks, markets or construction sites; workers told The Irrawaddy that if they were discovered as having contributed to a story on Little Myanmar, they feared they would be later fired. Wandering through Samut ...

Laos and Thailand have highlighted areas in which they will intensify economic cooperation and signed an amended Memorandum of Understanding on labour cooperation, Thai media reported on 6 July. The agreement was reached on 6 July by the two governments as Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith led a ...