Thai PM prepares minimum wage overhaul

The administration of new Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has said that its campaign promise to raise the country’s minimum wage could be realised by October, but any hope for an improvement to salaries for migrant workers remains tentative.

Yingluck, who was officially named premier on Friday last week and who is expected to announce her cabinet within days, said that the country’s minimum wage will rise to 300 Thai baht, almost doubling the current average of 160 baht.

Jarupong Ruangsuwan, secretary-general of Yingluck’s Puea Thai Party, told NNT news recently that the first stage of the policy to raise salaries for public sector workers will be carried out within three months, and the remaining by early next year.

Opposition politicians attacked the policy with claims that it would create a pull factor for more migrants to choose Thailand as their destination for work. More than four million migrants are believed to be working in Thailand, around 80 percent of which are Burmese.

The Thai Chamber of Commerce has also said that it will put pressure on the country’s garment industry, which relies heavily on cheap migrant labour, while denting the prospects for future foreign investment in the country.

Despite existing legislation, however, migrant workers regularly report that they are paid less than the minimum wage, begging the question of whether any improvement to salaries will reach them.

Ko Aye, a Burmese community worker who assists migrants in the Thai border town of Mae Sot, said that while the policy “sounds very delightful for migrant workers”, they are rarely paid the current minimum wage.
He added that more companies may look to exploit the lax enforcement of labour laws surrounded migrants, the majority of whom work in low-skilled industries and often do not enjoy the same workplace conditions as their Thai counterparts.

In April this year a police raid on a garment factory in Bangkok discovered 60 Burmese migrants who had been locked inside, some for up to eight months, and forced to work.

The majority of these had been forced to work on average 16 hours a day and were paid only 200 Thai baht ($US7) a month, something not uncommon in reports given by migrant workers.

A survey carried out recently by the International Labour Organisation exposed high levels of animosity among Thais of migrants. Of 1000 people questioned, 84 percent believed that unauthorised migrants have broken the law, while the majority also say that even authorised migrants “cannot expect the same working conditions as nationals when carrying out the same job”.

In another report last year, the ILO accused the Thai government of breaching international law in its denial of work accident compensation for migrants, despite high rates of workplace injury.

Thai Opposition Wins Election by Comfortable Majority

Thailand’s early election results indicate the opposition Pheu Thai party led by Yingluck Shinawatra, and backed by her brother, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, has won a majority.  Pheu Thai defeated the ruling Democrats of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and, although official results are not expected until Monday, Abhisit accepted defeat and congratulated his rival.

Thailand’s main opposition Pheu Thai party dominated Sunday’s nationwide election, the first in four years.

The contest was mainly between the ruling Democrats of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and the opposition Pheu Thai, led by Yingluck Shinawatra, the younger sister of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Even before official results were in, exit polls indicated Pheu Thai won a comfortable majority of seats in parliament.

The victory marks a dramatic political reversal for Thaksin and his allies nearly five years after he was forced from power in a military coup.

Abhisit accepted defeat and congratulated Yingluck Shinawatra on national television, welcoming her as Thailand’s first female prime minister.  But he said the Democrats would continue to oppose Pheu Thai’s plan to grant amnesty to politicians, including Thaksin.

He says they worked very hard for more than two years and he wants to thank everyone.  From today, he says, he wishes to see unity, reconciliation, and for the new government to do as promised.  He says the Democrats will be a constructive opposition party in the parliament, but will oppose any attempt to grant amnesty to any individuals.

Yingluck is widely viewed as a proxy for her brother who, despite being twice popularly elected, was ousted by the military in 2006 over concerns he was growing too powerful.

Thaksin critics say he was corrupt, authoritarian, and disloyal to Thailand’s revered monarchy.  He denies all the charges and in 2008 fled into exile to avoid a jail sentence for corruption.

Nonetheless, in the past four general elections Thailand voted overwhelmingly for Thaksin or parties aligned with him.

But controversial court orders dissolved those governments for election fraud and banned their leaders from office for five years.

Speaking on national television from Pheu Thai headquarters, Yingluck vowed to fulfill all her campaign promises and not to disappoint the people.

She says a lot of difficult missions are ahead.  For example, she says, solving people’s problems making a living, the economy, and leading the country to unity and reconciliation.  She says they must also develop Thailand and move the country forward.

But that may be easier said than done, especially if the amnesty goes ahead and Thaksin is allowed to return to Thailand.

He is a divisive figure, both hated and feared by Bangkok elites.

Since the 2006 coup, Thailand has seen sporadic street protests and violence in a power struggle between his rural and working class supporters and Bangkok’s traditional rulers and the military.

Yellow Shirt protesters claiming to protect the monarchy pressured Thaksin-aligned governments in 2008 by surrounding parliament and then taking over Bangkok’s airports.

Last year, clashes between soldiers and armed elements among Thaksin’s Red Shirt protesters left 90 people dead, most of them civilians.

Observers worry the election victory by Thaksin’s sister could lead to further demonstrations by Yellow Shirts or perhaps another military coup.  Thailand’s army chief repeatedly said before the election that there would be no more coups.

Thailand has had 18 coups or attempted coups since becoming a constitutional monarchy in 1932. Source: VOA

ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ၏ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မႈ အရွိန္အဟုန္ျမင့္လာ

ဘန္ေကာက္- ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံတြင္ လြန္ခဲ့ေသာႏွစ္က ကန္႔ကြက္ဆႏၵျပသူမ်ား အေပၚအစိုးရကႏွိမ္နင္း၍
ေသဆံုးခဲ့ ရသူမ်ားကို အမွတ္ရေစရန္အထိမ္း အမွတ္က်င္းပဖို႔ စု႐ံုးမႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရးတင္းမာမႈမ်ား ထင္သာျမင္သာရွိလာခ်ိန္မွာ ေမလ ၁၉ ရက္ ေန႔က ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ
အတြက္ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ မႈေတြကလည္း အရွိန္ျမင့္လာပါသည္။

ဇူလိုင္လ ၃ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ က်င္းပမည့္ဤေရြးေကာက္ပြဲသည္ဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္
အဘီဆစ္၏ အစိုးရအဖြဲ႕ေထာက္ခံေသာဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ပါတီႏွင့္ ၀န္ႀကီး ခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္း
ယခုအခ်ိန္တြင္ ထြက္ေျပးတိမ္းေရွာင္ေနရသူ သက္ဆင္ရွင္ နာ၀ပ္၏မဟာမိတ္ပါတီမ်ားၾကား
အႀကိတ္အနယ္ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္ရမည့္ အလား အလာရွိေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ သက္ဆင္သည္ ၂၀၀၆ ခုႏွစ္ အာဏာသိမ္း မႈတြင္ ရာထူးမွျဖဳတ္ခ်ခံခဲ့ရျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

အခ်ဳိးက် ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ေရြးခ်ယ္ ေရးစနစ္ျဖင့္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ေလာင္း
မ်ားသည္ ၾကာသပေတးေန႔၌ ေလွ်ာက္ထားႏိုင္ၿပီျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းလည္း သိရသည္။
အဘီဆစ္သည္လည္း သူ၏ ဒုတိယေျမာက္ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္သက္တမ္းရရွိ ေရးအတြက္
တရား၀င္အလုပ္မ်ားမွ ႏွစ္ရက္အနားယူကာ မဲဆြယ္ရန္ ႀကိဳတင္ျပင္ဆင္မႈမ်ားျပဳလုပ္ေနသည္
ဟု သိရသည္။

ၿဗိတိန္ႏိုင္ငံတြင္ေမြးဖြားသူ ေအာက္ စဖို႔တကၠသိုလ္ထြက္ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ အဘီ ဆစ္၏ပါတီျဖစ္
ေသာ ဒီမိုကရက္သည္ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ သက္တမ္း အၾကာဆံုးပါတီျဖစ္ၿပီး ေထာက္ခံမႈမ်ားကို ဘန္ေကာက္ၿမိဳ႕ႏွင့္ အျခား ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံေတာင္ပိုင္းေဒသမ်ားမွ အမ်ားဆံုးရႏိုင္သည္ဟုလည္း
သိရသည္။ သို႔ရာတြင္ ယင္းပါတီမွာ လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ဆယ္စုႏွစ္ႏွစ္ခုၾကာေအာင္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ
ေအာင္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ျခင္း မရွိေသး ေပ။

သူႏွင့္ ေအာက္လႊတ္ေတာ္ ေရြး ေကာက္ပြဲ ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မႈတြင္ အဓိကၿပိဳင္ ဘက္မွာ သက္ဆင္၏
အငယ္ဆံုးညီမ ျဖစ္သည့္ ယင္းလပ္ျဖစ္ သည္။ သူသည္ Puea Thai ပါတီမွေန၍ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္အျဖစ္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္အေရြးခံမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။

Puea Thai ပါတီသည္ ဆႏၵမဲေပး လႊာေပၚတြင္ ေနရာခ်ထားရန္ မဲႏႈိက္ ရာ၌ ထိပ္ဆံုးေနရာရခဲ့ၿပီး
၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ အဘီဆစ္၏ ဒီမိုကရက္ပါတီကမူ နံပါတ္ ၁၀ ေနရာ၌ က်ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ ၀င္ေရာက္ယွဥ္ၿပိဳင္မည့္ ပါတီေပါင္းမွာ ၂၆ ပါတီရွိေၾကာင္းလည္း သိရသည္။

ယင္းလပ္က သူ၏ပါတီ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါက ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမားမ်ားကို လြတ္ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းသာခြင့္ေပး
ရန္ စဥ္းစား ထားေၾကာင္းလည္း ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။သို႔ရာတြင္ သူ၏အစ္ကို အထူးအခြင့္အေရးမ်ား ခံစားရမည္ဆိုသည္ကိုမူ ျငင္းဆိုခဲ့သည္။ အဘီဆစ္ကလည္းေမလ ၁၉ ရက္ေန႔က ယင္းလပ္အား ရွင္းလင္းတိက်ေသာ မူ၀ါဒမ်ားခ်မွတ္ ၾကရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့ေၾကာင္းလည္း သိရသည္။