Thailand: Women and spaces for labour organizing

Abstract

A defining feature of Thailand's industrialization experience since the 1960s, and especially during the economic boom years between 1985 and 1995, has been the incorporation of millions of young, single, rural migrant women into the wage-labour relation across industry, manufacturing, services and informal sectors (Mills 1999). By the late 1980s, almost four million women formed the vast majority of the workforce in the labour-intensive, export oriented manufacturing sectors that were the main drivers of growth. By the early 1990s, 80 per cent of all workers in Thailand's ten leading export industries were women (Dotson 2005: 6). Over the same period, hundreds of thousands of other women were employed in the numerous shopping malls, department stores, restaurants, cinemas and entertainment areas, as well as in the burgeoning informal sector through subcontracting, household labour and piece work. Clearly, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of the economic contributions that feminized wage-labour has made to Thailand's transformation from the largely agricultural economy and society it was 30 or 40 years ago to the rapidly industrializing and globally engaged country it is today.