By law, domestic worker Banjong Wilaisri can take a break with paid leave today.
But like every other year, however, Ms Banjong's National Labour Day will come and go as another day of hard work with low and irregular pay and weak social welfare support.
She is not alone. Of the 40-million-strong workforce, only about 15 million enjoy the labour and welfare protections of the formal sector.
Ms Banjong belongs to the majority of 25 million informal workers who struggle to survive on their own.
Domestic workers are at the lowest rung of informal workers. As live-in maids, they must wake up before their bosses, cook, clean, do the laundry, look after the kids and pets, water the plants and do the dishes. And they retire to bed long after their bosses are asleep.
Often, their pay is cut if they make mistakes, and if they get sick, they have to pay for their own medicine.
Long hours and few holidays aside, working in private homes also makes domestic workers vulnerable to abuse, including sexual and physical assault.
Ms Banjong, despite her hardship, knows that as a Thai she faces a better situation than most foreign maids.
At least she speaks Thai, has relatives for support and can leave the house without fear of arrest or police extortion.
Take, for instance, the horrific and shocking abuse inflicted on a 12-year-old Karen girl earlier this year. Her skin is scarred from hot water and she lost the use of her arm after heavy beatings throughout her five-year enslavement. Unpaid and tortured, her job was to feed the slavemasters' dogs and cats.
Because of horror stories like that and other forms of worker abuse, a network of home workers and labour rights groups successfully pushed for the Home Workers Protection Act in 2010.
The law requires employers to give their domestic workers fair wages and respectful treatment while compensating staff for workplace accidents and occupational illness.
Regrettably, two years have passed, and the law has not yet been enforced.
The Labour Ministry last year also issued a set of ministerial rules requiring employers to give domestic workers a day off each week, plus overtime pay, 13 days' annual holiday and paid sick leave. But employers don't care because the rules can't be enforced. And forget the 300-baht daily minimum wage. It doesn't cover domestic workers.
Meanwhile, salaried workers face different problems. Salaried workers in the formal sector are the only group of people who pay for social security. Government officials don't, yet they get premium health benefits. People under the universal health scheme don't pay either, but their health benefits are better than the benefits formal workers enjoy.
Furthermore, when factory workers get sick from hazards at work, they'll surely go silent once the corporate bureacracy kicks into action, or until they quit.
For the past two decades labour movements have been calling for an occupational health institution to ensure fair and accurate diagnosis of work-related diseases, to no avail. Their demands for better welfare and pension schemes have also fallen on deaf ears at the Social Security Office, which controls and manages the 1-trillion-baht fund paid into by the workers.
Hence the people-sponsored bill spearheaded by female unionist leader Wilaiwan Saetia of the Thai Labour Solidarity Committee to amend the Social Security Fund Act. Backed by nearly 15,000 signatures, the bill seeks to improve social security benefits and to make the management of the Social Security Office more transparent, more efficient and more responsive to workers' needs. It was sent for parliamentary consideration last month, but lawmakers promptly rejected it.
They rejected it because Ms Wilaiwan's bill requires the SSO head to be a professional manager elected by the board rather than an official appointed by the government. Workers also wanted their own representatives on the board.
In 1990, Ms Wilaiwan joined labour activists in a hunger strike to pressure the government to make Social Security Act changes, and it worked.
She was also among unionist leaders at the forefront of the protests that finally led to all working women being entitled to three months' maternity leave.
"We will continue to press for our version of new a Social Security Act which will ensure that informal workers have the same rights," she said.
"Migrant workers too will be protected by the labour law and will receive proper welfare benefits. Don't expect me to be disheartened and stop the fight."
Sanitsuda Ekachai is Editorial Pages Editor, Bangkok Post.