Through their union, a Solidarity Center partner, workers at the Ford Rayong auto plant in Thailand are paid good wages and work in safe conditions. Credit: Solidarity Center/Julian Hadden
Together with local partners, Solidarity Center supports workers seeking to improve their working conditions despite challenging circumstances: Under Thai labor law, workers in the private sector are severely limited in the right to form and join unions, and employers frequently dismiss workers who are trying to form unions. The courts often take the side of employers and pressure workers to drop their complaints and migrant workers are prohibited from organizing and freedom of association.
The Solidarity Center also joins with Thai unions and community groups in pushing for enforcement of international labor standards and national labor law, protecting the rights of migrant workers, preventing human trafficking and achieving legal redress for trafficking victims, and ensuring workers have access to justice and to the social benefits and protections they are guaranteed under law.
Some 2,000 fast food workers and supervisors at one of Thailand’s largest KFC franchises recently won the first-ever collective bargaining agreement in the kingdom’s fast food industry, a pact that includes an early retirement program, 23 meals provided by the company...
After working several years at an auto parts factory outside Bangkok, Prasit Prasopsuk compared conditions at his workplace with those of a friend employed at a similar plant—and realized his wages were lower and working conditions worse because there was no union...
An estimated 200,000 Burmese migrants fuel Thailand’s huge fishing industry in Samut Sakhon province, an hour outside of Bangkok. The majority of workers are ethnic Mon from farming villages in southern Burma and they send their salaries to their families back home....
