Issara visits rescued female Lao workers

SWEATSHOPS

Social Development and Human Security Minister Issara Somchai recently visited 20 young illegal Lao workers rescued from a sweatshop where they were forced to work 15 hours a day making garlands without pay or any days off.

The migrants, all females aged from 12-18, were sent to the Kredtrakarn Protection and Occupational Development Centre after police raided the sweatshop and rescued them on May 14.

The raid followed the police arrest on May 8 of a 15-year-old Lao girl who was selling flower garlands at Wat Rai Khing in Nakhon Pathom province.

The girl, an illegal migrant, told the police that 19 other Lao girls were being kept as slave workers at a house in Samut Sakhon's Krathum Baen district.

Police raided the house on May 14. The house owners, Kasem Pensuk, 48, and Thawanrat Sukprasertngam, 42, were arrested and charged with human trafficking, housing and employing illegal workers, and illegal use of child labour.

The girls said they were forced to make flower garlands from 5am to 8pm every day without pay or days off.

Nang, 14, whose fingers were severely blistered because of the hard work, said she came to work in Thailand to help ease the financial burden of her poor parents back in Laos.

She said her parents could not afford to send her to school, adding she had been working to help support her family since a very tender age.

Nang said her employees had never allowed her to make any contact with her family since she came to Thailand in April last year. They also did not pay her any wages, saying they would send the money she earned directly to her mother in Laos.

The girl said she and a friend from Savannakhet province in Laos were smuggled into Thailand by a Lao human trafficker.

"I miss my mum very much, and I won't return to work in Thailand again if I can go back home now," Nang said.

Mr Issara said the rescued girls would be returned to Laos as soon as possible after all necessary legal proceedings were completed to ensure the wrongdoers would be brought to justice.

The girls would also receive all the wages and overtime pay still owed them in line with the minimum wage rate at 203 baht a day effective in Samut Sakhon, the minister said.

For the time being the girls would remain at the Kredtrakarn Protection and Occupational Development Centre, where they would undergo both physical and psychological rehabilitation, he said.

The centre now houses 205 young victims of human trafficking and other social problems.

More than 84% of them were smuggled into Thailand from Burma, Laos and other neighbouring countries to work largely in the sex industry, small factories and as beggars.