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November 13, Integrated Regional Information Networks via Irrawaddy
Thailand's unprotected, uninformed migrant workers

Seven years ago, in her small Burmese hometown, Tha Zin, 30, a garment
factory worker, watched as one of her closest friends—a girl just a few
years younger—sickened and finally died of an AIDS-related illness.

As her condition worsened, most people in the community stayed away but
Tha Zin, much to the chagrin of her parents, continued to visit her dying
friend, comforting her as best she could, despite her own uncertainty over
whether she could be at risk.

Tha Zin, then 22, didn't really know what caused the condition, though the
rumors in the neighborhood were that it had to do with her friend's
relationship with a certain "sugar daddy." "At that time, I didn't know
much about this disease and how it could be transmitted, but I thought
that I had a pure heart so I should be okay," she said.

Today, she has a far better grasp of HIV transmission. In the Thai border
town of Mae Sot, where she arrived 3 years ago in search of work, she has
attended several AIDS awareness sessions organized by the charity, World
Vision, as part of a US $12 million, 5-year project to help foreign
migrant workers in Thailand reduce their risk of contracting the virus.

Tha Zin is now an informal peer educator in the factory where she works,
sharing her newly acquired knowledge with other workers, mainly younger
Burmese women who have come to Thailand alone.

Talking about HIV to these young women is a tough task. "It's very
difficult to share awareness and knowledge," she told IRIN/PlusNews. "When
I explain, some people look down on me. They think, 'she knows everything
about this disease, so she must have been a prostitute'. In their
experience, they think the disease is only from sex workers and drugs.
They don't know you can get it from needles and bleeding."

Low levels of knowledge and awareness

Thailand is thought to have nearly 2 million foreign migrant workers,
mainly toiling in low-paying jobs in factories, on farms, construction
sites, and fishing boats—the so-called "three Ds", for "dirty, dangerous
or degrading"—jobs many Thai's are unwilling to do.

Most foreign workers live in highly concentrated areas like Mae Sot, a
town on the Burmese border that has become a centre of the Thai garment
industry, and Samut Sakhon, 28km southwest of Bangkok and a hub of the
labour-intensive seafood processing industry.

While precise figures on the number of migrant workers in Thailand are not
available, the overwhelming majority—an estimated 90 percent—are from
neighboring Burma. In Burma, the highly conservative military junta
publicly recognized HIV/AIDS as a threat to its population only about six
years ago, after years of insisting that the country had no such problem.

The regime still tightly controls efforts to raise awareness about the
disease: non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have complained of limits
on the number of people who can attend HIV workshops, and prohibitions on
their operating in many parts of the country, particularly sensitive
ethnic minority areas.

This means most Burmese workers arrive in Thailand with little
understanding of HIV/AIDS or how to protect themselves when they move away
from their families and find themselves at greater risk of HIV. Similarly,
migrants from Cambodia and Laos, coming from the poorest regions of their
countries, often also have a poor understanding of the virus.

HIV prevalence statistics for migrant workers are not available, as the
Thai government does not survey migrants separately, but sample reports,
primarily among foreign fishermen and sex workers in border towns, showed
high but fluctuating prevalence rates between 2002 and 2004, according to
the Prevention of HIV/AIDS Among Migrant Workers Project (PHAMIT) in 20 of
Thailand's provinces.

For example, in 2004, HIV prevalence among fishermen, who are mainly
Burmese, was 9.6 percent in Chumpon Province, and 5.6 percent in Phuket
Province; among the mainly Burmese sex workers in Ranong—a major port in
Ranong Province, which borders southern Burma—HIV infection rates stood at
28 percent; and among the mainly Cambodian sex workers in the province of
Trad, bordering Cambodia, it reached 38 percent, the health ministry said.

PHAMIT, funded by the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria, consists of NGOs and works with the Ministry of Health to
increase foreign labourers' knowledge about HIV/AIDS.

As part of the project, the Global Fund has financed the development of
information, education and behaviour-change communication material in
Burmese, Cambodian and several ethnic minority Burmese languages to help
migrants understand issues like HIV, reproductive health and family
planning, and how to access Thai health care.

Reaching out to migrants

Yet, even with the support of the Thai health ministry, efforts to reach
out to foreign workers have been beset with difficulties, mostly stemming
from their precarious position, given their illegal status, constant risk
of deportation and often grueling work schedule.

Although Thailand depends heavily on foreign workers, around half of them
are unregistered and, technically, illegal, leaving them vulnerable to
police harassment as well as serious exploitation by their employers,
according to labour rights organizations.

In Mae Sot, where World Vision and other humanitarian groups have sought
to train women in every garment factory to serve as informal peer
counselors, many of the women, who are in Thailand illegally, are forced
to work six days a week and late into each night, with some getting only a
single day off each month, which gives them little or no free time to
attend training sessions on health or other issues.

To conduct all-day in-depth trainings, charities have to appeal directly
to factory owners to release some of their workers for a day. Many are
reluctant to do so, or agree, only to change their minds on the day of the
planned training.

"It's up to the employer," said Mie Mie, a Burmese HIV/AIDS coordinator
with World Vision. "Sometimes they say, 'Yes, you can come and do
counseling,' but on the day we come, they say, 'we have so many orders'."
The charities also have to pay the women for the wages lost during
training time.

Dr Ei Ei Khin, a Burmese physician and technical advisor to World Vision's
migrant worker projects in Thailand, said even when workers understood how
to protect themselves from HIV, their more immediate fear was the risk
that they would be arrested and held in immigration detention centers
before being either freed or deported, thus losing many days of work and
wages.

This often deters garment workers in Mae Sot from leaving their factory
compounds, where they normally live, and restricts access to condoms
unless charitable groups supply them to directly to the workers quarters
in the compound. "If there is no NGO working for that factory, it's very
difficult for the workers to get access to condoms," Khin said.

In recent years, the authorities' attitudes towards the migrants,
especially in some provinces, have been hardening, with new restrictions
being introdu

ced to curtail the mobility of migrant workers. In several
provinces, local authorities have prohibited migrants from using mobile
phones, riding motorbikes, being out after 8 p.m., or gathering in groups
of more than five.

Despite these hurdles, Khin believes the message is slowly reaching
Thailand's foreign labourers. "Behavior is changing," she said. "It's not
enough, but it's changing."

[The Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) is a news service
that forms part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (OCHA). But this report does not necessarily reflect the views of
the United Nations]

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