More than 24,000 workers to get Bt300 daily wage

This means that an additional Bt23.9 million would be spent on the daily wages of 24,419 qualified recipients, Labour Minister Phadermchai Sasomsap said in his capacity as the board’s chairman. The Cabinet will endorse this payment next Tuesday.

Labour Ministry’s permanent secretary Somkiat Chayasriwong said the Bt300 daily wage would be paid in 50 provinces from January 1 as a result of initial approvals by provincial wage tripartite committees. The approvals will be presented to the central wage tripartite committee by next Wednesday for a final endorsement.

Meanwhile, a Bangkok seminar was told that bigtime human traffickers who kept smuggling immigrant workers into Thailand had never been arrested because they paid off corrupt officials.

“Around 600,000 workers are arrested, deported and again smuggled into Thailand, but the authorities never arrest the traffickers because they know each other,” Suraphong Kongjanthuek, an official from the Lawyers Council of Thailand, said.

Citing a study conducted by the council, he said migrant workers were required to pay traffickers up to Bt20,000 every time they enter Thailand, and nearly all of them are asked for anything between Bt500 and Bt10,000 by corrupt police officers. 

He said immigrant workers should also be paid the Bt300 minimum wage, because this will encourage Thai workers to do jobs they were refusing to do before. Meanwhile, businesses that pay low wages at the workers’ consent should move out of Thailand, he said.

Somphong Sakaew, director of the Labour Rights Promotion Network, said migrant workers had complained to him that corrupt officials wanted up to Bt15,000 in exchange for dropping wrongful charges of illegal gambling, or returning their properties or passports. Even though more than 1 million migrant workers had registered after the latest deadline, up to 4 million are still unregistered, he said.