On Aug 15, a joint task force of soldiers, two police units and civil servants made the biggest raid of the week in Pattani province in the deep South. The only casualty in the swoop was common sense. The raid resulted in the arrests, summary trial, fines and pending deportation of two women from Myanmar. Their offence was teaching the children of migrant workers without pay.
The bureaucrats who accompanied the armed raiders on the Laem Nok monastery were functionaries of the Department of Employment, Ministry of Labour. They had detected the criminals who were teaching children without a permit. They authorised and supervised the arrests on the grounds the women were volunteering without a work permit. They also noted that the arrested women were lying when they claimed to be working without pay, because they had received lunch from the monastery for their labour. On some principle they did not explain, they ordered police to arrest a third Myanmar woman who was observing the teaching and the raid.
This extreme case of arresting and punishing volunteer workers has brought to light the existence of this ancient and rather silly law. It is decades old and falls under the portions of Thai labour law and regulations known as the Working of Foreigners Act BE 2521, that is 1978. But even that somewhat outdated collection of labour regulations was itself an update to earlier acts.
