A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  Yet most family firms remained patriarchal. Curiously, the entertainment industry remained rather male-dominated, and the television dramas tended to repress women by portraying them as weakly subordinate, more emotional than rational, and prone to tragedy, especially as the reward for ambition. Meanwhile, political power retained a strong male bias, from bottom to top. In 1995, only 2 per cent of village heads were female. In the bureaucracy, women were an overwhelming majority in the lower rungs and a negligible minority at the top. The female proportion of MPs never exceeded 15 per cent. As a result, the strong patriarchal bias in the legal framework changed slowly and women continued to be disadvantaged, especially in marital law. Men continued to acquire women as minor wives or through the sex industry, while demanding different standards from women.

  Labouring hard

  The policy shift in the early 1980s quickened the pace of urbanization. Urban labour demand grew. The multiple crises in agriculture (see below) encouraged more migration out of the villages. Between 1985 and 1995, the manufacturing labour force doubled to almost 5 million. At the height of the boom, in five out of six years running, a million people a year shifted from agriculture to an occupation in industry or services. Many still circulated between city and village for short or medium periods. But gradually more moved more permanently to the city. The catchment for urban migration spread beyond the central region, which had supplied most of the early migrants. From the mid-1980s, the majority came from the northeast, the poorest region. The second language of the city became the northeastern dialect of Lao.

  During the 1973–76 political upsurge, workers secured a labour law that legalized unions and federations. After the 1976 coup, the Thanin government revoked the law and promised foreign investors they would have no difficulty with strikes. This policy was eased in the late 1970s, but labour was still kept under control by a battery of measures. Legislation restricted unions to labour issues and outlawed political activities. As part of anti-communist strategy, the military intervened to divide worker organizations and to co-opt labour leaders with patronage ties. The government established tripartite (labour–employer–government) bodies, which set minimum wage rates and mediated labour disputes. The labour bureaucracy practised divide and rule by selective patronage. Once Thailand set out to attract foreign firms manufacturing for export, this enforced docility of labour was advertised as one of the country’s attractions.

  With growing labour demand and a more democratic atmosphere in the 1980s, labour organization temporarily strengthened. In 1989–90, unions won a Social Security Law providing basic medical care and life insurance. The minimum wage was raised. State enterprise unions successfully resisted proposals for privatization. But these victories were short-lived. After a military coup in 1991, the junta government banned all unions in public enterprises, halving union membership to below 5 per cent of total workers in manufacturing. A labour leader who opposed the ban disappeared without trace.

  Government antagonism towards labour encouraged employers to evade labour laws. Textile, garment, and other labour-intensive industries were the first to grow in the boom. Some of the workers were gathered into factories, but many more worked at home or in small workshops under putting-out or subcontract arrangements. By the late 1980s, garment making was estimated to employ 800 000 in this way. Gem, shoe, toy, and many food industries used similar arrangements. In factory-based industries, such as textiles, employers hired workers as subcontractors or on short-term contracts so they could reduce their labour force easily and evade the labour laws. A 1988 survey of factories in one of Bangkok’s industrial suburbs found 61 per cent of workers were hired on subcontract.

  The technology firms that led industrial growth from the late 1980s needed a more trained and settled workforce. Conditions in these factories were generally better than elsewhere and the work was highly prized. Yet employment conditions were still uncertain. The processes that these firms located in Thailand were mostly assembly and other labour-intensive jobs that required keen eyesight and good manual skills. Firms preferred younger workers. Few could expect to remain employed beyond the age of 40, and in some firms beyond 30. Besides, many firms were footloose. While the computer-part maker Minebea was the country’s largest single employer in the early 1990s, five years later its workforce had dwindled to a tenth. Many computer disk-drive firms moved from Singapore to Thailand in the early 1990s, making the sector one of the largest employers, and then moved on to China a decade later.

  With no unemployment benefit system and usually no pension scheme either, some workers retained links to their village as their main form of social security. In the 1997 economic crisis (see below), around 2 million people, or one-in-eight of the non-agricultural workforce, were laid off within a matter of months. Many relied on the village as a temporary shelter while they sought new work. But large parts of the working class had become permanently urbanized and severed from any rural base. In the crisis, they dropped into sweatshops, vending, and petty services to survive.

  With the formal union movement trussed up by legislation, patronage, and bureaucratic control, a movement of informal ‘labour clubs’ spread through the working-class suburbs of the capital. They organized protests at the workplace level, provided mutual support, and allied with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and activists. After a fire at the Kader toy factory in May 1993 killed 188 and injured 500, this informal movement pressured government for better regulation of health and safety at work.

  Many firms preferred women workers, not only because of their skills but also because they could be paid less. From the early 1980s, three out of every five additional recruits to the manufacturing labour force were women, and by 1995 half of the total was female. In seven of the 10 leading export industries, four-fifths of the workers were female. Beyond the factories, women supplied much of the other labour needed by the booming urban economy. They carried bricks on construction sites, staffed the department stores, sold noodles on the pavement, hawked T-shirts in the markets, and welcomed the tourists in the hotels and bars. By the mid-1990s, more women than men were leaving the villages in the migration streams. The birth rate fell sharply as women delayed marriage and childbearing. The nature of the rural family changed. Young couples often left children with their grandparents in the village while they went to the city to work. In some villages of the northeast, ‘There is no one left but old people and little children’.7 A 1997 song, ‘Home’, told the story:

  Oh you young kids, so much suffering, not enough to eat.

  The young brides and bridegrooms have all run away to Bangkok.

  Only old folks and young kids are left behind,

  Waiting for them to come home and work on the land of their birth.8

  Money in the pocket gave working women a new standing in the family and in village society. Festivals that used to mark the transitions in the agricultural calendar were transformed into occasions for young people to return from city jobs to visit the village, pay respects to their parents, make merit at the temple, display their prosperity, see their children, and maintain their long-term ties to family and community.

  As the labour market tightened in the early 1990s, the borders were tacitly opened to admit labour migrants from neighbouring countries. By 1994, an estimated 400 000 had crossed the borders and were working in Thailand. Three years later, the number had grown to 1–3 million (nobody was quite sure), possibly 10 per cent of the total labour force. The vast majority of these came from Burma, in flight from its collapsed economy and repressive regime. Smaller numbers came from Cambodia, Laos, and China. They worked in the fishing industry – some fishing ports became Burmese enclaves – on fruit plantations, as housemaids, and in sweatshops. Much of the garment industry relocated to the Burmese border region. The government established a permit system to legitimize these migrants in 1995, made a half-hearted attempt to eject them during the 1997 crisis, and reintroduced permit systems with restrictions on areas an
d sectors in 2000. But only a minority registered under these schemes. Most were allowed to stay under informal arrangements negotiated in each locality. They had few civil rights and no protection. They earned around 50–60 per cent of local wage rates. Those who argued with their employers risked being beaten or killed. By the early 2000s, they had become a semi-permanent labour under-class of 2–3 million people.

  The first deaths from HIV/AIDS in Thailand were recorded in the mid-1980s in the gay community. In the late 1980s, the infection rate increased rapidly by transmission through the large sex industry, especially in the north, making Thailand one of the centres of the epidemic. By the mid-1990s, 2 per cent of the sexually active population was reckoned to be HIV-positive, and AIDS had become the single largest cause of death. The government launched containment policies from 1990 and the sex industry cooperated for survival. By the mid-1990s, the rate of new infections had begun to decline and Thailand had become a model for community-based approaches to the problem. But infection continued to spread beyond the sex industry, especially by transmission from philandering men to their wives and among sexually active youth. By the early years of the new century, 600 000 were infected.

  Rural decline

  In the 1970s, analysts predicted that Thailand’s peasant society would be transformed into a society of commercial farmers and landless labourers by population pressure and the power of the market, especially in advanced areas, such as the central region. But around 1980, the emphasis of the economy shifted away from agriculture. Industry overtook agriculture in contribution to GDP in 1984, and to exports in 1985. By 2000, agriculture supplied only 10 per cent of GDP and 7 per cent of exports. Once the economy was no longer driven by agriculture, the government’s attention and private investment were redirected elsewhere. The CP agribusiness conglomerate turned to telecommunications. Sugar firms bought into hotels. Rice millers built Bangkok shopping malls.

  The land crisis never materialized because people were drawn away to the city. In the central region alone, the rural labour force dropped from 3.5 million to 2.5 million over the boom decade (1985–95). To compensate for the drain of labour, farmers invested in tractors, automated harvesters, chemicals, and other aids. Growing urban demand and easy access to markets enabled the remaining farmers to move into higher-value cropping patterns. Some grew three crops of rice a year. Some abandoned paddy and planted fruit and vegetables for Bangkokians to eat. Some grew crops such as babycorn to be canned for export. In the 1990s, many farmers turned their rice paddies into seawater ponds for tiger-prawns, reaping in two years profits equivalent to a lifetime of paddy-farming, though with high risks from disease and salination of the land. For the first time in 150 years, the area planted to paddy in the Chao Phraya delta shrank.

  In other areas with good natural conditions and good access to booming urban markets, the same pattern was repeated. In the Chiang Mai valley, farmers turned paddy land into lychee and longan orchards for export to China. In the coastal rice-bowls down the east coast of the peninsula, more farmers took to fish and prawn farming. On the lower Mun and Chi rivers in the northeast, the saline land proved perfect for growing the jasmine rice preferred by urban consumers and overseas markets. In all these areas, smallholder family farming survived, but became much more commercialized. The younger generation of the family left for education and urban work, but with better roads and bus services, and with the relocation of industry closer to the labour supply, many could commute on a daily or weekly basis. The higher-value crops and urban incomes brought more money into the community, creating opportunities for new local businesses, such as shops, auto repair, beauty parlours, and karaoke restaurants. In these advanced rural areas, villages acquired a suburban air.

  Beyond these areas favoured by nature and urban access, conditions were more difficult. Farmers faced two problems. First, from the mid-1970s agricultural prices declined on a worldwide scale. If measured in terms of sacks of rice, the cost of a two-stroke motorcycle, one of the rural family’s first durable purchases, increased three to five times over the next 30 years. In more remote and less fertile upland areas, it was difficult to counter this trend of falling prices by diversifying away from crops such as rice, maize, and cassava whose prices were falling.

  Many farmers subsided gradually deeper into debt. Between 1987 and 2000, total debt to BAAC, the government’s agricultural bank, grew 10 times (from 25 to 256 billion baht). The government tried to counter the price fall by crop diversification schemes, but with poor results. Some schemes failed because of harsh local conditions. Some failed because of incompetence – imported cattle breeding stock that proved to be infertile were famously dubbed ‘plastic cows’. Some failed because government agencies recommended the same scheme to everybody, creating a market glut.

  Some farmers reacted to the unreliability of the market by trying to withdraw from it. Local communities invented credit clubs, rice banks, buffalo banks, and environmental groups to reduce their dependence on the outside. A Chachoengsao village headman, Wibun Khemchaloem, abandoned the rice monoculture, which had sunk him in debt, and devised a small mixed farm, which was virtually self-sufficient. He became one of several public advocates for this strategy. In 1994, the king presented a model version of a similar mixed farm, along with a ‘new theory’ based on the Buddhist principles of sufficiency (pho yu pho kin) and self-reliance (phueng ton eng).

  This strategy was inspirational, but difficult. Many other households survived by compromising between subsistence and market. They clung onto their land and village base, still grew their own rice in spite of market logic, hunted and gathered for foods and other needs, and took part in non-market forms of local exchange. At the same time, they sent out more of their youth to earn cash from the urban economy. By the mid-1990s, almost two-thirds of farm households’ total cash income was earned away from the farm (four-fifths in the northeast), including 43 per cent from wage work. The cash was used for everyday consumption, for investment in sustaining the increasingly unprofitable farm, and for education, which might release the next generation from farming.

  The second problem was that the booming urban economy became a competitor for the resources of land, water, and forests on which many smallholder farmers depended.

  Around Bangkok, housing estates and factories sprawled across the Rangsit tract, which had pioneered the rice frontier a century earlier. To the east, some of the pioneer areas of the 1950s upland expansion were buried under the Eastern Seaboard’s industrial estates. In the north, resort projects sprouted on valley slopes. Land was also lost to new highways, to golf courses (over 100 were built in the boom decade), to quarries for construction materials, and especially to dams and power stations feeding the growing urban demand for power. The total cultivated area shrank by 2 per cent over the 1990s.

  After the defeat of the CPT, the Forestry Department began to reassert control over the depleted forests, half of which had disappeared in 30 years. It agreed with a suggestion from some agribusinesses to grant areas of degraded forest on long-term leases at minimal rents for ‘reforestation’ as commercial plantations. Many businesses took this opportunity to plant large areas with trees for the pulp and paper industry, particularly eucalyptus. Adjacent villages objected because they lost usage of the forest and because eucalyptus trees drained the local watertable. Activists discovered that politically connected firms used these provisions to take control of areas of pristine forest. Villagers in parts of the northeast attacked bulldozers clearing the land for eucalyptus, destroyed seedling nurseries, and burnt Forestry Department property.

  In early 1989, a landslide on an eroded hillside in the south carried away two villages. The incident triggered the government to revoke all logging concessions and declare the forests closed. In fact, illegal logging continued. Particularly along the Burmese border, timber was felled and then transported in and out of Burma (sometimes only in the paperwork) so that it could be claimed as legal import. In many other are
as, resorts continued to be built on cleared forest land. Between 1989 and 1995, another 7 million rai of forest disappeared. Villagers living in the forest adapted the idea of ‘ordaining’ trees by wrapping them with a yellow robe, as in the ordination of monks, to prevent them being felled. In 1995, villages across the north cooperated to ordain 50 million trees to mark the king’s jubilee.

  Dams built for irrigation and hydropower generation also deprived villagers of land, forests, and fishing rights. The first dams had been built on the upper reaches of the Chao Phraya where they flooded deep valleys in mostly unoccupied forests. But such prime sites were rapidly exhausted. By the mid-1980s, most future plans would dam rivers used by local villagers for fishing and flood areas that already had a large settled population. Villagers affected by such schemes began to protest.

  Water became another focus of competition, especially in the Chao Phraya delta. Because of expanding cultivation in the north, less and less water reached the dams storing water at the head of the delta. Meanwhile, Bangkok’s usage of that water increased: from 0.5 million to 7.5 million cubic metres per day between 1978 and 2000. During 1993–94, the El Niño climatic effect lessened annual rainfall, resulting in a sharp drop in water storage in the dams. The Irrigation Department issued a ban on second-crop cultivation in the Chao Phraya delta. Many farmers refused to comply and fought officials trying to control the watergates. Officials began to talk about a ‘water crisis’ and the need to tax and regulate irrigation, especially to safeguard water supplies for the capital.