A Thai chicken factory has agreed to demands related to overtime and allowing migrant workers to leave its compound to buy food following last week’s protest by hundreds of Cambodian laborers, the factory’s management and a labor group said.
About 500 Cambodian migrant workers at a food production factory in Thailand’s Chon Buri province protested on Wednesday, saying that they cannot continue under the economic pressure levied by the company for the past three months.
Workers say debt and a lack of jobs in Cambodia are pushing them to consider crossing the closed border amid labor shortages in Thailand, despite the pandemic. Programs to get Cambodian workers back in Thailand are in the works, but concerns remain over conditions and safety.
Thailand plans to allow a group of 500 Cambodian workers to return to work legally in Thailand for the first time since borders were closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, officials said on Tuesday.
Migrant workers in Battambang said they had no capital or land to start a farm and were heavily indebted. And with a glut of workers returning to the countryside, farm labor jobs were scarce and barely paid enough to live, they said.
A Cambodian man who tested negative for Covid-19 was found dead in a quarantine center in Tbong Khmum province on Wednesday after voluntarily quarantining himself there since Sunday.
Cambodian citizens will be allowed to enter the country without a health certificate declaring them free of Covid-19, which is required for arriving foreign nationals, Prime Minister Hun Sen announced on Wednesday.
More than half of surveyed families in a Banteay Meanchey village said the need to repay microfinance loans compelled some in their households to migrate to Thailand for work, which researchers say is part of a longtime, well-documented trend of debt-driven migration.
For some Cambodian migrant workers in Chon Buri, concerns about their livelihoods will keep them in Thailand on Saturday.
Families are calling for government intervention as the detention of 85 migrant workers and children without charge — including some as young as 5 —
The Phnom Penh court on Thursday sought ways to streamline the mass trial of more than 130 opposition supporters in the face of missed names, crammed-in defendants and complaints that the accused had no information about what they were accused of.
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