The plight of Thailand's women workers
Sanitsuda Ekachai
It was not just a gimmick to make people take notice of their plight. By taking their clothes off and throwing their bras into Government House, the women workers were telling the men in power that their policies were robbing women clean. As usual, the message hit a brick wall.
On Tuesday, a group of women workers from Inter Moda garment factory made headlines with their protest gimmick.
Many people laughed, thinking it was merely a crazy idea to get media attention. It is why women workers, the invisible backbone of Thailand's export industry, will continue crying.
What triggered the usually submissive women workers to take to the streets? The strengthening of the baht? The employers' refusal to pay compensation for lay-offs? The law in favour of investors? The inefficient bureaucracy?
The answer is all of the above. And more.
Inter Moda is the latest victim in a string of mass layoffs during the current economic downturn. The employers all pointed the finger at the strengthening of the baht. And the authorities nodded sympathetically, without making an effort to see if this was just a pretext for the employers to shift their factory bases to where they can find cheaper labour.
While the labour authorities try to limit labour disputes to a matter of compensation, the problem goes much deeper.
In a cut-throat business world driven by profit maximisation, investors naturally head where the costs are lowest. And when our society says it is okay to pay women less than men, the employers naturally hire primarily women.
This is why 80% of the workers in Thailand's top 10 manufacturing industries for export are women.
They are hired not because they are good at delicate handiwork, but because women labour, being viewed as unskilled, comes dirt cheap.
As the backbone of an export industry that is highly vulnerable to fickle external market forces, women are hit the hardest whenever the country's export-dependent economy is in disarray.
And the problem does not stop with lay-off compensation.
Many see the current mass layoffs as the employers' ploys to reduce their costs even lower by turning more extensively to outsourcing home-based workers or hiring much cheaper migrant labour along the border.
Again, most of these workers are women. They toil without any work benefits for meagre pay, in poor working conditions. They face occupational hazards without being entitled to compensation or state help.
As informal workers, they are not protected by the labour law.
We must ask if our country's cheap labour policies are based on women's blood, sweat and tears.
Is this the way we want to prosper economically? On women's backs?
Fixing the law might not help much when our society still does not give economic value to women's labour.
Housework, for example, is considered not only free labour, but a woman's duty. Stereotyping women as unskilled labour and men as belonging to the world of machines and modernity also perpetuates the unequal payscale along gender lines.
If women's traditional work continues being belittled as economically unproductive, women cannot get a fair deal when they enter the workforce.
The gender biases in our culture and investment policies are not the only things that keep women invisible. The bureaucrats' tendency to kowtow to investors has also kept women down.
Hence, the last-ditch effort to be visible and treated fairly for once by the Inter Moda garment workers. Their stripped-clean gimmick had nothing to do with sex, although the media trivialised it that way by describing their taking off their clothes step by step. It has everything to do with gender oppression. And desperation.
It is to show we have nothing left, said one laid-off worker in tears.
If policymakers do not rethink investment policies which keep labour cheap and our cultural values that keep women down, we will see no end of women workers' tears.
Bangkok Post Sept. 13, 2007