Labor policy and administration

The 9th Meeting of the Asean Committee on the Implementation of the Asean Declaration on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers opened in Vientiane on 10 May. The meeting was organised by the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare. Participants also discussed the ...

In its first, tenuous start toward a policy on migrant workers, the National League for Democracy is drawing up a bill to address the millions of citizens outside the country. “We are now making observations for the bill. I think it will take three months to ...

Over 1 million temporary passport holders in Thailand will not be allowed to renew their expiring residency documents, issued between 2009 and 2013 as part of a national verification process. Instead, they are being told to forfeit their legal status, and apply for “pink cards” that ...

The National Assembly of Cambodia on 4 April passed a contentious trade union law, just hours after a group of pro-union demonstrators and Daun Penh district security guards clashed violently outside.“They did not explain clearly what their intentions [were to retain articles in the law],” ...

A final group of 24 fishing boat slaves is preparing to return home to Burma this week from Indonesia, aid workers said at a trafficking meeting in Bali, one of them calling the 1,200 slaves repatriated since last year the “tip of the iceberg.” Keep reading ...

Cambodia’s Ministry of Labour is bringing back a beauty pageant for garment workers, which unions and commentators have deemed a “regressive” distraction from deep-seeded inequalities in the sector. Keep reading ...

The head of the National Assembly’s legislation commission of Cambodia said he hoped to have a controversial draft union law passed “very soon” after the latest round of feedback from unions and employers during a public workshop at Parliament on 9 March. Cambodian People’s Party parliamentarian ...

A three-month investigation into dodgy dealings in the murky jade industry has netted dozens of government officials, with two director generals dismissed from their posts earlier this week. The President’s Office on 3 March confirmed that the director generals from two Union government ministries, as well as ...

Four Cambodian domestic workers sent to Malaysia despite an official moratorium on the practice have been repatriated amid claims of unpaid wages and harsh working conditions, though the company that recruited them has insisted that the terms of their employment didn’t technically violate the government ...

Thailand will send 77 illegal Cambodian migrant workers home on 19 February after they were rounded up at a construction site in the southern peninsula of the country, border authorities said on 18 February. Sin Nam Yong, a border official in Banteay Meanchey’s Poipet town, said ...