Facebook post inspires landmark case for migrant workers in Thailand
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 litter and culling the sick among the birds as they grew from chicks to poultry for slaughter. After that, they worked 10-hour days for three weeks cleaning the warehouse-sized coops at the Thammakaset chicken farm in Lopburi province. And finally they got three days off. All that work for what they figured was a fair wage: nearly US$7 a day, with free rent and electricity. “We thought our employer was a nice guy because he gave us rooms, and we didn’t have to pay rent,” Tun Tun Win said. “We stayed for free, and we got our money.”
