Mekong Migration Network

Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – A guidebook to promote recognition of domestic worker rights was released Thursday at a press conference in Bangkok by the International Labor Organization.

The book, entitled ‘Domestic Work - Decent Work’, published in seven languages including Thai, Burmese, Lao, Shan and Karen, will be distributed through the Labor Ministry and labor advocacy groups. A total of some 17,000 copies are available.

Thetis Mangahas, the ILO’s regional migration specialist, said in the press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand (FCCT) that domestic workers such as maids, nannies, drivers, security guards and gardeners should receive fair pay regardless of nationality, ethnicity or gender, according to a report in Friday’s Bangkok Post.

Additionally, Thetis said the aim of the guidebook is to help domestic workers so they do not fall into labor exploitation traps, while simultaneously empowering them with the necessary information about their rights.

According to an ILO report, ‘Domestic workers in Thailand: their situation, challenges and the way forward’, released on January 20th 2010, among all registered domestic workers in 2009, the majority (101,509 persons) were from Burma. There were 107,777 registered female domestic workers and 21,490 registered male domestic workers – with most male domestic workers serving as gardeners.

“The demand for and number of migrant domestic workers from Burma, Laos and Cambodia has been on the rise, since their salary is lower than that of Thai domestic workers. However, migrant domestic workers are more vulnerable to exploitation than Thai domestic workers, especially those below the age of 18,” finds the report.

The reports authors added that some migrant domestic workers who have lived and worked in Thailand for a longer period might be in a better position, as they are able to speak Thai and have developed support networks. According to research, the situation and working condition of migrant domestic workers differs between those living and working in border provinces and those in bigger cities.

While distributing the booklets at the FCCT, the ILO also took the opportunity to promote its conference on domestic workers scheduled for June in Geneva.

Anantachai Uthaipattanacheep, director of the Labor Ministry’s legal department, said there might not be clear-cut laws to protect domestic workers, but the 1998 Labor Protection Act does provide some safeguards.

While the ministry is planning to review legal standards to better protect domestic workers, labor advocates are not happy about the time it is taking.

Anantachai added that the ministry has established two help hotlines for victims of labor trafficking and those dealing with issues related to contracts and work permits.

Friday, 29 January 2010 21:28 Usa Pichai

The International Labour Organisation has released a guidebook for domestic workers to promote recognition of their rights.

About 17,000 of the booklets titled Domestic Work _ Decent Work, printed in seven languages including Thai, Burmese, Lao, Shan and Karen, will be distributed through the Labour Ministry and labour advocacy groups.

Domestic workers such as maids, nannies, drivers, security guards and gardeners should receive fair pay, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or gender, Thetis Mangahas, the ILO’s regional migration specialist, said yesterday.

Ms Thetis said the aim of the guidebook was to help domestic workers so they did not fall into labour exploitation traps while empowering them with the necessary information about their rights.

While distributing the booklets, the ILO is also promoting its conference on domestic workers in Geneva in June.

Anantachai Uthaipattanacheep, director of the Labour Ministry’s legal department, said there might not be clear-cut laws to protect domestic workers but the 1998 Labour Protection Act did provide some safeguards.

The ministry is planning to review legal standards to better protect domestic workers, but labour advocates are not happy about the time it is taking.

Mr Anantachai said the ministry had provided two help hotlines _ 1300 for immediate help for labour trafficking victims and 1506 to deal with contract violations and work permits.

Kanchana Di-ut, of the Foundation for the Health and Knowledge of Ethnic Labour, said Thailand lacked adequate legal and social mechanisms to protect domestic helpers and the government must move quickly to address the problem.

Ubon Romphothong, of the Women’s Foundation, said negotiations with the Labour Ministry had stagnated over key issues such as designated holidays for domestic workers and registration.

Non-governmental organisations working on labour issues have long called for the amendment of the 1998 labour law which contains no explicit clauses to protect the rights of domestic workers.

”The easiest way for the government to show its sincerity is to provide a legal blanket for domestic workers,” Ms Ubon said.

She said there were about 30,000 domestic workers registered with the ministry _ most of them foreign migrant workers. However, the real number could be as high as a million since many had not registered as they were minors under 18 or illegal migrants.

One domestic helper, 25-year-old Po-Po, a Burmese national of Pa-o ethnicity who has been working in Thailand for eight years, pleaded with employers to allow them to form social or support groups to help each other.

”We should be treated with some dignity and not be given heavy workloads of 12 hours or more,” Po-Po said.

Samorn Phasomboon, a maid who is chair of the Domestic Workers Network, said the government should extend social security protection to domestic workers.

BANGKOK, Jan 28, 2010 (IPS) - Po Po has been enduring long hours of hard work, poor pay and abuse within the confines of her employer’s home for the past seven years. Poverty forced her to leave her family in eastern Burma and abandon a university education to work as a domestic helper in Thailand.

“There is constant uncertainty about a domestic work,” said the 25-year-old in an interview with IPS. “In my last job, I worked for 11 hours a day, but I had to be available for 24 hours if my employer needed me.”

Po Po is one of scores of domestic helpers in Thailand who stand to gain from the combined efforts of migrant rights advocates and the International Labor Organization (ILO), a United Nations tripartite body, to raise the profile of domestic workers this year.

In June, the ILO’s International Labour Conference (ILC) in Geneva will break new ground by placing domestic work on its agenda.

“The discussion at the ILC will be the first time an international instrument to provide social protection to domestic workers will have been formally considered,” said Thetis Mangahas, regional migration specialist at the ILO’s Asia-Pacific office, at the launch on Thursday of a book about their rights.

“If enough member states agree to the idea, a convention and/or recommendation could be ready for adoption by the following year.”

“Here in Thailand there are half a million workers in households, and this is a conservative estimate,” added Mangahas during the launch of ‘Domestic Work – Decent Work’. “Most of them are women.”

“Migrant domestic workers are the most vulnerable,” she said. “They are a hidden workforce and that is no excuse for abuse.”

“Many men are also domestic workers,” she added. “These people work as maids, nannies, drivers, security guards and gardeners. They look after our children, they often care for our elderly family members; they are often the first to rise in the morning and often the last to go to bed.”

Thai trade unions are echoing such views in the national push to secure rights for the frequently abused domestic workers. “Currently, the protection domestic workers face is that they don’t have protection,” said Surat Chanwanpen, vice president of the Labour Congress of Thailand. “We need to get domestic workers to enjoy the same rights as those working in industry.”

The challenge to help these female domestic workers is complex because of the nature and arrangement of their work, Ananthachai Uthaipattanacheep, a labour ministry official, conceded during the launch of the ILO guide. “Protecting domestic workers is different from protecting general workers or industrial workers, because most of them live with their employers.”

The Thai government took a significant step to help this vulnerable labour force late last year by endorsing the views of rights groups that domestic workers should be covered by the same social protection net as other workers in this South-east Asian nation.

“Many domestic workers do not know their rights, so they don’t know when they are being abused and what they should do,” said Po Po.

Among these rights are fair pay, safe work, rest time and privacy, the ILO’s guidebook notes. “In return for your labour, you have a right to expect – and receive – fair pay and decent working conditions. You also have a right to keep in touch with your family and friends and that includes the right to leave the house and visit other people and places during your off time.”

Elsewhere in Thailand are similar efforts to improve the conditions of migrant domestic workers.

A soon-to-be-launched community radio station in Mae Sot, a town on the Thai-Burma border, aims to fill an information black hole faced by migrant workers from military-ruled Burma, many of whom have no legal papers and are victims of abuse.

The new station, FM 102.5, has a line-up of awareness-raising and entertainment progammes in Burmese and Karen, two of the languages used by the tens of thousands of migrant workers who have fled their homes for a job in Thailand.

This station, according to the non-governmental Migrant Action Programme (MAP), will continue the same MAP-supported community radio station that has been broadcasting in Chiang Mai, a northern Thai city, for over a year and a half.

“The community radio stations are particularly useful for the domestic workers among the migrant workers in Thailand,” said Kanchana Di-ut, a programme officer at the Chiang Mai-based MAP. “Because they, more than other migrant workers, are often cut away from the outside community by the nature of their work, inside people’s homes.”

“They can listen to the station and learn about news regarding migrant workers’ rights that they are not getting,” Kanchana added. “Domestic workers are the unseen and forgotten workers.”

Chiang Mai’s FM 99 community radio station tries to engage the predominantly female domestic workers through a two-hour weekly programme on late Friday mornings, said Kanchana. “It is a mix of a call-in show, where the migrant workers can say if they need information, listen to the latest news about the situation domestic workers face and some songs and entertainment.”

MAP’s community radio stations are but one way groups committed to helping Thailand’s estimated 1.5 million migrant workers have risen to the challenge. Most of these workers are from Burma, or Myanmar, a junta-ruled country they fled due to conflict or a crumbling economy.

Domestic workers from South-east Asia account for a substantial slice of the estimated three million migrant workers from Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines, Vietnam and Burma who have crossed borders into more affluent places like Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

Entitled to protection, worker advocates say

Labour laws need amending to help 400,000 housemaids who are being neglected despite the huge economic contribution they make, a seminar has been told.

Sumet Ritthakanee, chairman of the House committee on labour, said housemaids were not adequately protected under the labour law.

Mr Sumet yesterday told a seminar on the rights of domestic helpers that many were subjugated and taken advantage of by their employers.

They have no access to state welfare even though they generate 27 billion baht for the economy each year, he said, citing estimates from the Kasikorn Research Centre.

He insisted the maids were fully entitled to better legal protection and welfare.

He said they were largely underpaid, face gruelling working conditions and, in some cases, suffer sexual harassment at the hands of their employers.

Mr Sumet said maids’ working conditions could be improved by amending laws related to the compensation and labour protection fund.

Bundit Panwiset, head of the foreign labour advocate network, said the government should amend the 1998 Labour Protection Act to give helpers better legal protection and allow them to acquire labour skills training.

Maids should have a safe and clean working environment, work no more than eight hours a day and no under-age helpers could be hired, he said.

Suchin Buakhao, a domestic helper for 10 years, said she worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week and was not paid whenever she took leave. “The work is very tough,” Ms Suchin said.

“I have to serve not only the employer’s house but also the house of his siblings. I wish I could have a day off.”

She earns 4,500 baht a month and buys most of her food and drinking water. Her employer gives her only rice to eat. When she is sick, she pays her own medical bills.

A Tai Yai ethnic maid, who declined to be named, said she had to put up with sexual harassment.

Her present employer pays her 2,500 baht a month. But she has no days off and gets abused when she asks for leave to see her relatives.

Writer: PENCHAN CHAROENSUTHIPAN

Nang Kham was a 14-year-old girl when she left her native town of Lashio in northern Shan state, eastern Burma.

Dreaming of a better life and a brighter future, she came to Thailand in 1996 and worked for nearly 10 years as a maid for a Thai family at a daily rate of 14 baht [US $0.40].

Nang Kham was promised 1,500 baht [$43] per month by the couple who employed her, but they told her they would not give her the money in hand each month, saying they would save it for her.

Nang Kham agreed to the arrangement, and after nearly a decade of work, the sum she was owed as wages amounted to 48,000 baht [$1,403].

“Her employers refused to let her leave the house, even for a visit to her hometown after she had been working for several years,” said Rujisanwee Pim, a coordinator for the domestic worker campaign run by the Migrant Assistance Program (MAP), a Chiang Mai-based non-governmental organization.

Unable to bear the increasing mental harassment, Nang Kham appealed to friends and relatives for help, but no one dared intervene.

When her boss found out she had made contact outside, they changed phone numbers and destroyed all her phone contacts, Nam Kham told Pim.

Nang Kham finally decided to escape when her employers offered her 10,000 baht ($292) for her decade’s wages.

Through friends, Nang Kham was able to contact MAP, who helped her negotiate with her former employers and Thailand’s Department of Labor Protection and Welfare.

Nam Kham’s employers were made to pay the 48,000 baht they owed, but they were able to deduct household expenses and the cost of her work permit, said Pim.

“She [Nang Kham] was so sad at the way they deceived her,” Pim told The Irrawaddy.

“After a decade of abuse all she wanted to do was get home as quickly as possible. She was lucky she wasn’t raped as well,” she said.

According to Thailand’s Board of Investment, the minimum daily wage ranges from 148 baht to 203 baht [$4.72 to $5.79], depending on province. In Chiang Mai it is currently set at 168 baht [US $4.79], but domestic workers will seldom get this rate.

Ma Moe, a former civil servant working for the Burmese government who has been a domestic worker in Thailand for 4 years, said: “Living standards are better here than in Burma. We come here because we have little choice.

“When I started my first job, my boss agreed to pay me 800 baht [$23.35] per month, but in reality I only got 500 baht [$14.60]. My neighbors told me my employer had relatives who were in the police, and they said other people working there before hadn’t been paid at all.

“I’m lucky I got paid,” she said.

Ma Moe described how one of her sisters, who currently works at the home of a lieutenant-colonel in the Thai police, has to work at any hour demanded, is rarely able to get out of the house, and is restricted in what she can eat.

Ma Moe currently works at the home of a foreigner, who, she says, treats her well, but she said her former boss, another foreigner, was rude.

“He got angry with me when he couldn’t find something and would accuse me of taking whatever it was he had lost. It was humiliating,” she said.

Mai Mai, who works as a rights campaigner with MAP, said: “Many domestic workers in Thailand are illegal, which puts them under psychological pressure. Abuse from their employers makes things worse.”

Jackie Pollock, the director of MAP, said: “Most governments don’t consider domestic workers as labor, and they neglect their rights. Next year, the International Labor Organization will discuss the rights of domestic workers for the first time.”

MAP is marking a regional “International Day of Solidarity with Domestic Workers” on August 28 by supporting a campaign to send postcards to the Thai Ministry of Labor demanding recognition and protection of domestic workers’ labor rights and the right to a guaranteed one day of paid leave per week.

MAP is distributing 10,000 postcards and has already circulated 5,000 [More details on the campaign can be found under on the MAP website].

Ma Par Lay, a maid who has got to know Mai Mai, brightens up at mention of the campaign.

With a lively voice that belies her wearisome appearance she asks everyone she meets to join the postcard campaign.

“It can help us achieve a better future,” she said.

Ma Par Lay and hundreds of domestic workers like her are trying to change things so that young girls who come to Thailand to work won’t end up like Nang Kham and go home with broken dreams.”

By KO HTWE