Hundreds of factories surround the border city of Mae Sot in the far west of Thailand. It is so close to Myanmar that at times the bombs of the civil war can be heard from its centre.
Almost all the garment factories here rely on the flow of cheap Burmese labour fleeing war and economic hardship. Their hard work, willingness to accept pay well below the Thai minimum wage and a lack of legal rights make them an attractive prospect for factories trying to cut costs. And the sale price of what they produce on these tiny wages attracts big brands.
David Welsh, Solidarity Center’s Thailand country director, said: “Most people don’t know about Mae Sot. The same trends found in other supplying markets are there, however; namely a jurisdiction where the rule of law is weak, where wages and labour conditions are substandard, and where union access is denied. Add to that that the workers are entirely migrants with little to no legal protections and this constitutes very much the wild west of the global supply chain, largely unknown to consumers.
“All of these are factors that tend to attract brands rather than repel them. This is a dynamic that needs to change.”
Now, after years of terrible wages and conditions, a small group of workers are beginning to force that change.
The 130 Burmese former workers at VK Garments (VKG) who are taking legal action in England against Tesco are part of a bigger trend to take on the brands making profits from their labour.
Workers at VKG sewed F&F jeans to supply to the Thai branch of Tesco’s business from 2017 to 2020. They brought a case in Thailand’s labour court and in September this year the factory was ordered to pay out severance and notice pay. The workers are also seeking alleged unpaid wages but they do not have much hope that the factory will be made to pay out.
Alongside Starbucks, the Walt Disney Company and NBC Universal, Tesco paid compensation in 2020 to Burmese workers at another garment factory that did not pay minimum wage after some blew the whistle to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. In that case, a Thai court ordered 26 Burmese workers be given $110,000 (£90,400) compensation from the factory owner. When the factory owner could not pay the full amount, the rest of the bill was instead picked up by Tesco and others.
Welsh believes that subcontracting in areas where the workforce is known to be vulnerable needs to be challenged. “No brands own their own factories. They deliberately subcontract in places where conditions are terrible and the rule of law is bad. This creates the legal fiction that they bear no responsibility for those conditions when in fact they are a driving force in allowing them to persist.”
Since 2014, Mae Sot has been a special economic zone, making labour laws less restrictive.
Naing Aung Aung, the leader of the Arakan worker organisation, which supports Burmese migrant workers in Thailand, said: “In Mae Sot compared with the rest of Thailand there are a lot of illegal factories. There’s a limited rule of law and also there are a lot of labour rights violations in the factories.”
Migrant workers are also banned from forming or leading unions in Thailand, limiting their ability to fight back.
Charit Meesit, a lawyer who is representing former workers at VKG in the Thai courts, said the authorities “know what’s going on but they turn a blind eye” and that the country lacks “proper enforcement” of its labour laws.
He added: “It’s an open secret that Mae Sot is notorious for abusing workers. Even Burmese workers know Mae Sot is notorious but they are willing to go because they know that relatively the pay they can get is still better than they can get in Myanmar. They don’t care about the minimum wage in Thailand, they just know that working in Thailand is better paid than in Myanmar. That’s why they keep their mouths shut.”
A Tesco spokesperson said: “Protecting the rights of everyone working in our supply chain is absolutely essential to how we do business. In order to uphold our stringent human rights standards, we have a robust auditing process in place across our supply chain and the communities where we operate.”
They said that if it had identified issues of the kind alleged at the time it would have stopped using the factory. The spokesperson added: “We understand the Thai labour court has awarded compensation to those involved, and we would continue to urge the supplier to reimburse employees for any wages they’re owed.”
