The migrants desperate enough to live in 'container villages' who keep Thailand's economy ticking over
An estimated 4 million foreign migrant workers have flocked to Thailand in search of higher wages.
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 25 October, 2015, 10:11pm
UPDATED : Monday, 26 October, 2015, 3:05pm
Agence France-Presse in Bangkok
Migrant construction workers in Samut Prakan, Thailand, call these steel containers home. Photos: AFP
The village sprang up in a matter of days - neat lines of bright- yellow houses that looked like something a child might have built with Lego bricks.
This eye-catching complex on the outskirts of Bangkok is unlikely to win any architectural awards. But for the hundreds of migrants who live there it is an unusually neat home in a country where poorly paid foreign workers often toil in harsh conditions.
The village is made out of refurbished shipping containers, stacked three blocks high and connected by a series of walkways and ladders.
Over the next three years its 800 or so inhabitants will construct one of the many luxury condo blocks that add to the Thai capital's ever-shifting skyline.
An estimated 4 million foreign migrant workers have flocked to Thailand in search of higher wages, often in the kind of low-paid, physically demanding and sometimes dangerous industries that comparatively wealthy Thais now have little appetite for.
The vast majority of these workers, many undocumented, hail from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos and work in the construction, agriculture, fishing and manufacturing industries.
"Migrant labourers are now working in areas where Thais no longer wish to work," said Jeff Labovitz, chief of mission in Thailand for the International Organisation for Migration.
"They're more dangerous than other jobs, the conditions are not necessarily as good and the pay is not necessarily as high. But for those people coming to Thailand, it's much higher and much better than it is in their home country."
A family lives in one of the camps made of containers. Photo: AFP
Dam, 30, is typical of those who oil the lower rungs of Thailand's economy. As a welder he earns 400 baht (HK$87) a day, almost three times the average daily wage in his native Laos.
And because his accommodation is already paid for by the construction company, most of that money goes home to his family of rice farmers.
Their accommodation is spartan. While the container homes boast electricity, they don't have running water, and bathing takes place communally.
Sexual harassment in communal bathing areas is a "specific problem", said Max Tunon, a regional official at the International Labour Organisation.
Each 12-metre-long container is divided into four sections, with some housing an entire family of four. Once a condo block is built, the container village will be moved to the next project.
But others have it much worse. Rights groups have long documented exploitative and dangerous conditions for Thailand's migrant workers.
This year the European Union threatened to blacklist Thailand's fishing industry, partially because of conditions faced by migrant workers on board vessels.
The United States also placed the kingdom on the bottom tier of its human-trafficking index for the second year running.
