To help protect migrant workers from exploitation, all those involved with their issues must break the shackles of bureaucratic frameworks and cast aside old attitudes, then join hands to tackle the problems together, advocates for the rights of migrant workers said recently.

"You are working piecemeal, and don't have a blueprint for combating the exploitation of migrants," said Saisuree Chutikul, chairwoman of the National Committee to Combat Trafficking in Children and Women.

After listening to the stories of two migrant workers, she urged both local and international bodies to pool their resources and work together.

The first story came from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Institute for Population and Social Research at Mahidol University. The Mahidol researchers recently presented their ILO-funded study on migrant workers, saying the reality of migrant workers in Thailand was still one of exploitation, harassment, low pay, overwork and negligence.

The other story came from the Labour Ministry, whose representatives attended the forum where the Mahidol findings were presented last week. Nara Ratanarut, director of the Irregular Migrant Workers Division of the Foreign Workers Administration, responded by saying that only a minority of migrants had faced such problems.

"I wonder whether the sampling population of the research study can really represent all migrant workers. As we know, migrant workers are now under the protection of the law and enjoy the same basic rights as Thais do," he said.

Nara was referring to the number of migrant workers registered with the ministry last year, which was more than 100,000 people, while the sampling population was less than 700 people.

He said the status of migrant workers in Thailand was much higher than in other countries, particularly neighbouring countries.

"If you were an illegal migrant worker in our neighbour, you would be deported regardless of what would happen to you. But here in Thailand, though you are illegal, we don't deport you to face a brutal fate in your country. And once you are arrested, and we find out you have been cheated by your employers, we force the employers to pay you," he said.

ILO claimed that Mahidol's paper was the first of its kind in presenting problems of migrant workers in a systematic way. However, the problems pointed out by the paper were not new for the Thai public particularly to those who had worked in the field for years.

"It focused on the problems that we have known about. The good contribution of the research is it collected problems in a scientific way that can be used as a reference," said Sompong Sakaew of the Labour Rights Promotion Network, who has worked in the field for about a decade.

The arguments of the Labour Ministry were also familiar to Sompong.

"He has kept on saying something like this whenever we talked about the fate of migrants," Sompong said.

Throughout the decade he had worked for migrants in Samut Sakhon - a coastal province where the Burmese have made a major contribution to the economy by working in the fisheries industry - the main obstacle to helping improve the lives of migrants was that each organisation was trapped in its own framework.

The country does not lack organisations to voice migrant problems, or agencies to make policies to protect the migrants, he said.

"Unfortunately, we don't have organisations to take action, to eliminate the problems, to make the policies work as intended," he said.

Saisuree wondered if the title of Mahidol's study - "The Mekong Challenge - Underpaid, Overworked, and Overlooked: the realities of young migrant workers in Thailand" - was chosen before or after the researchers finished their data collection.

"If you titled it earlier it was too dangerous because it means you have your assumptions and the research is only to prove your assumptions," she said.

The Labour Ministry needs to accept the reality that exploitation does exist in the country, she said. "Thailand is not the only country reported as exploiting migrant workers. The problem is everywhere in the world."

The ministry should set up a committee that allows representatives of academia and non-governmental organisations working on migrant issues to have seats. The ministry's tripartite labour committees comprising workers, employers and state officials seemed not to be efficient enough to tackle the problems, she said.

Mahidol's paper was conducted and presented to mark International Migrant Day tomorrow.

The story of the exploitation of migrant workers was heard this year amid praise from international agencies that migrant workers in Thailand can access healthcare services and education much better than those in other countries. Nara wondered why the issue was not mentioned in the ILO-funded paper.

Since 2004, the Interior Ministry has allowed migrant workers to register as legal workers who can access the universal healthcare scheme that the government provides to Thais. And last year, all migrant children could access the education system via public schools.

Sureeporn Punpuing, a researcher on the Mahidol team, admitted that her paper didn't reflect the whole picture of migrant workers' lives.

"But it shows that problems do exist with some migrant workers. Rather than keep finding excuses, the [Labour] ministry should eliminate them," she said.

Thetis Mangahas, project manager of the ILO Mekong Sub-regional Project to Combat Trafficking in Children and Women, also said the problems might be small but they exist and need to be solved.

"Thailand does stand out as a modern country in the way that transparency and discussions are being held. The dark side the research pointed out is a small number of 5-10 per cent, but we have to give it a lot of attention," she said.

Myint Tun, a Burmese worker who has made his living in Thailand for more than two decades, said registration would mean more to migrant workers if the Labour Ministry heard their voices. In one way, the registration system drove some migrants into worse situations since their employers charged a much higher registration fee than the government required and also seized their original ID cards.

"Rather than protecting us, the registration system turned out to be a new tool for employers to abuse and exploit us," he said.

"Without the cards, we can't go anywhere and can't access health services. In the past we didn't have rights and we didn't pay, now we still don't have rights but we have to pay."

Pennapa Hongthong

The Nation