MIGRANT WORKER ACCIDENT
ACHARA ASHAYAGACHAT
The Supreme Administrative Court has backed the Chiang Mai Administrative Court's ruling that it had no authority to consider if a circular published by the Social Security Office (SSO) was responsible for denying compensation to a disabled Shan migrant worker. Nang Noom Mae Seng, a Shan who was left paralysed from the waist down in December 2006 after an accident when she was working at a hotel in Chiang Mai, claimed disability compensation from the SSO. However, in July 2007 officials refused her application for compensation and instead ordered her employer to pay her 2,418 baht a month for 15 years.
Ms Noom appealed against the decision. In January 2008, the SSO rejected her appeal on the grounds that the Chiang Mai SSO had acted lawfully and according to procedures for compensating migrant accident victims contained in a SSO circular issued in 2001.
The Human Rights and Development Foundation and the National Human Rights Commission intervened until Ms Noom's employers eventually paid her lump sum compensation that far exceeded the amounts stipulated by the SSO order.
Human rights activists say the circular is preventing most migrant work accident victims from getting compensation in all but rare cases.
So they filed a case with the Supreme Administrative Court.
Following the court's decision, Burmese migrant workers' struggle to gain access to better work accident and disease compensation will now move to the international arena, said Somchai Homla-Or, secretary-general of the HRDF.
Most of the two million migrants in Thailand from Burma, Cambodia and Laos originally entered illegally without documents and cannot produce the documents required by the circular.
The fault lies not with the migrant workers, but with the dysfunctional system regulating the import of Burmese migrants to work in Thailand, Mr Somchai said.
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