Daniel Pedersen

Daniel Pedersen
Journalist

 

“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

 

US President Abraham Lincoln, Clinton, Illinois, September 2, 1858.

 

In a city that has been described as the world’s largest brothel, Thailand Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva on Saturday told an audience in Pattaya that Mae Sot in northern Thailand would become a “special economic zone”.

This “zone” will combine Mae Sot and Tha Sai Luad (Mae Tao to the Moei River) municipalities.

The merged administration will be vested with powers to create laws that override national laws and regulations.

On the same day Abhisit made his announcement in Pattaya, human rights organisations marked anti child-trafficking day in Mae Sot.

It is an irony the two events collided, one a press conference to relay a “positive” announcement from a government in need of such proclamations, the other a low-key bid to highlight a tragedy that plays itself out every day along the Burma border.

Conservative estimates have more than 20,000 Burmese sex workers in Thailand at any one time and in 2000, Burma’s Federation of Trade Unions estimated that 80,000 women and children had been sold into Thailand’s sex trade in the preceding 10 years.

In laundries and noodle shops, in clothes stores and coffee shops, in foundries and factories, Burmese citizens, some mere children, carry out the menial labours of Mae Sot.

On the city’s outskirts, Burmese citizens provide the labour to make “brand-name” clothes that are shipped all over the world.

This translates into foreign revenue earnings for Thailand, bolstering its GDP figures.

Every one of the Burmese workers in and around Mae Sot is paid less than the minimum a Thai citizen is legally entitled to.

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Thailand’s Board of Investment (BoI), in its 2010 report “The Cost of Doing Business in Thailand” quotes the minimum wage for a Thai citizen in Bangkok at 206 baht a day, “but a little less than that in the provinces”.

Working six days a week, an unskilled Thai worker would earn more than 5,000 baht a month.

A starting wage for a Mae Sot domestic worker, possibly a girl as young as 12, may be as little as 800 baht a month – with a place to sleep and food part of her package.

Progressing to a restaurant or noodle shop, an entry-level wage – again with a place to sleep and food – is 1,200 baht.

However, both of these positions would involve work seven days a week, for as long as 16 hours a day.

For a man, unskilled labouring can pay about 100 baht a day, carpentry or construction work might stretch to 150 baht a day.

This is reality in Thailand’s newest “special economic zone”.

Many businesses would not exist should they be forced to pay Thailand’s minimum wage to their employees, and there would be no-one to do the work anyway.

But just across the Moei River from Mae Sot lies Burma, home to a vast human resource of 50 million-plus, many of whom are heading for Thailand to escape civil conflict and a ruined economy, seeking work that will pay much-needed cash.

Desperation erodes people’s self confidence, but their determination to survive is often accentuated when faced with situations such as Burma’s hopeless economic malaise.

This is where the apparent Burmese preparedness to labour at demeaning jobs stems from.

In Mae Sot Burmese workers constitute the bottom rung of the labour pool.

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The creation of special economic zones in Thailand is part of a major decentralisation programme the government has been forced to embark upon.

Constitutionally demanded, Thailand’s 1997 charter – penned during a period of humbling economic failure – requires that local administrations receive a 35 per cent share of the nation’s tax income by 2006.

That didn’t come about, and now tambon and provincial organisations, municipalities and the two special administration zones in Bangkok and Pattaya receive 26 per cent of the Kingdom’s tax revenue.

The constitution’s architects, in demanding a decentralisation of revenue distribution, sought to redress systematic failings made apparent during the 1997 economic meltdown.

On Saturday the Thai PM Abhisit pledged that required 35 per cent share would be achieved across the country within seven years, blaming the 2008 global economic turmoil for the delay.

That such turmoil came two years after the original constitutional deadline did not rate a mention in Abhisit’s Pattaya address.

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The Thai government’s Public Relations Department in October 2009 said cross-border trade with Burma amounted to 144 billion baht in 2008, about a fifth of Thailand’s entire trade with neighbouring countries.

The PRD said most of this economic activity was concentrated in Tak province, specifically Mae Sot.

The Tak Chamber of Commerce has been requesting a second bridge across the Moei River for years, citing its load limit of 25 tonnes as problematic.

Construction of that bridge has now been approved and multi-lane arterial roads are rapidly being built leading to the river.

In the meantime the road from Tak to Mae Sot is being expanded from two to four lanes and a railway line mooted.

The PRD also referred to development of a “one-stop service centre and logistics park”.

Abhisit said Mae Sot’s local administration would “be given some authority other local administrations do not enjoy”.

In reality the police and, to a lesser extent, the military control Mae Sot and always have done.

Regular sweeps of the market area by police net bribes to allow illegal migrant workers to avoid arrest.

Bribes paid by factory owners ensure police will not raid their premises.

Police brazenly sell illegal Burmese timber they have seized at the side of the highway leading out of town.

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Mae Sot is surrounded by multiple police and military checkpoints to the north, south and east and the Moei River to the west.

For a Burmese migrant worker without appropriate papers, moving in any direction from Mae Sot is impossible, so they are stuck with rock-bottom wages or no work at all.

Yet Thai people-brokers can arrange transportation to Bangkok for illegal immigrants looking or work.

In Bangkok, a starting wage as a domestic servant could be as high as 4,000 to 5,000 baht a month, plus food and a place to sleep.

If the person transporting the illegal worker is caught, they could face two years’ jail, a 50,000-baht fine or both.

The illegal workers would face deportation, landing in the hands of Burma’s endemically-corrupt immigration officials.

Passage to Bangkok usually costs a migrant worker about 12,000 baht – this often comes in the form of a loan, with interest, repayments for which are deducted from their wages each month, sometimes for years.

That Burmese workers are prepared to endure such conditions to escape Mae Sot says a lot about the rewards for toiling in the country’s newest economic zone.

But there is little incentive to become one of Burma’s legal expatriate workers.

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) says the ruling Burmese military junta insists foreign workers pay a flat 10 per cent tax on their earnings.

And registered workers are also required to present 50 per cent of their entire earnings to their local Burmese embassy as “funds for their relatives”.

Migrant workers registered in Thailand must also pay 1,300 baht a year for public health insurance.

To register an employee, employers must obtain a worker-registration card from Thailand’s Immigration Department, a cost the employer often passes onto the worker by cutting their wages.

To register a foreign worker without a passport costs 1,500 baht.

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On the same day that Mr Abhisit announced Mae Sot would become a special economic zone, People Volunteer’s Association chief Thein Sen was at the knife’s edge of dicey negotiations.

The People Volunteer’s Association has taken several forms since it first came into being in 1994 as the Burma Volunteers Group.

It worked steadily under Thein Sen, a former All Burma Students’ Democratic Front commander, for 12 years helping migrant workers out of any and every fix they found themselves in until 2006, when it became an association registered in Thailand.

In 2008 it changed its name again, to the People’s Volunteer Association because, said Thein Sen, “it must have all the people, we must help everyone, we don’t want to divide people by nationality.

“We really are here to help everyone, Thai bosses, migrant workers, people stuck in the cycle of domestic violence, we come in and help, we come in and help mediate,” he said.

“Some of it is workers’ rights, some ownership or owners’ rights, some domestic violence, we arrange legal aid, we help apprehend people traffickers, we simply make a conscious decision to help people,” he said.

As Mr Abhisit declared that Mae Sot’s local government would become a law unto itself, Thein Sen was dealing with a gun-toting Thai farmer who had become a law unto himself.

Thein Sen said, after eight years working at the same Thai-owned farm, a Burmese migrant family had decided to leave and go back home.

They asked for their wages.

He agreed and asked them to get in his pickup.

Then he drove them to his home where he pointed a gun at them and accused them of stealing 20,000 baht from his sister.

Still at gunpoint, he ordered them to remove their minimal gold jewelry and hand it over to him.

Terrified, they did so, but he demanded more and threatened to kill all of them, all the while waving his pistol in the air erratically.

He held the family hostage and released one man to go in search of more money.

Hearing his tale of woe back in Mae Sot, another family handed over all their gold jewelry so he could have his family released.

When the second family became involved they let Thein Sin know about the situation.

Thein Sen was once a All Burma Students’ Democratic Front commander, used to settling issues with a gun.

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The All Burma Students Democratic Front was a product of a violent crackdown upon university students in 1988.

The junta is still paying for its brutality in the form of networks established worldwide to fight for democracy and unhinging the ruling military regime.

In the aftermath of the 1988 crackdown on protests by students the universities were closed and the students who remained alive made for Karen State, into the arms of the Karen National Union.

At the time the KNU and its military wing, the Karen National Liberation Army, maintained a substantial military base at the conjunction of the Salween and Moei Rivers, a safe haven for ethnic armies and the National League for Democracy, the pro-democracy movement headed by Aung San Suu Kyi.

The true death toll of the military’s shooting spree in the capital Rangoon shall never be known because it was obviously covered up by the military regime.

University students walked for days through the jungle under constant attack by their own “government” forces to reach a safe haven protected by landmines and KNLA soldiers.

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There is a direct bus between Pattaya and Mae Sot once a day, leaving at 6.30pm.

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