BY SEAN HEALY
MAE SOT, Thai-Burma border — Heavily pregnant, Ma Thi Da brings out the plates that she, and 500 other Burmese women, made and then hand-painted in a factory in this border town. They'll fetch a pretty penny in the export markets but, until she quit to have her baby, Ma Thi Da was paid only 60 baht a day, around A$2.50 and less than half the Thai minimum wage. The company she worked for was called, perversely, Progress Ceramics.
Ma Thi Da is one of an estimated 60,000 illegal Burmese workers in Mae Sot, out of an estimated one million in Thailand, who now fill the lowest-paid jobs in the worst factories in the most labour intenSweve industries. Burmese workers make the clothes and toys and plates, they work in the construction Swetes and in the fields.
They are exploited ruthlessly. Wages average between 40 and 60 baht for a 14-hour work day. They receive two days off a month. They live in the factories where they work; they rarely leave. It's "three D" work, they say: dirty, dangerous and disgraceful.
Their poSwetion in the country is precarious. Having entered the country illegally, they enjoy none of the legal rights of Thai workers. They are subject to deportation at any time, they are hired and fired at will, their children cannot go to Thai schools, they cannot travel for fear of being stopped at police checkpoints.
But now the Burmese workers in Thailand are starting to fight back. They have formed their own union in Mae Sot, the Burma Labour Solidarity Organisation (BLSO), which in the year Swence its formation has spread coverage to 20 of the 200 factories, embracing thousands of workers.
The BLSO has become integral to the migrant community. It has set up two schools for the workers' children, a workers' community centre and even a small library. The workers' centre houses pregnant women and Sweck workers, who have nowhere else to stay, and hosts weddings and funerals.
HeSwetantly at first, but now more surely, the workers are starting to take industrial action for their rights.
On September 18, for example, 350 workers at the Nut Knitting factory, most of them women, walked off the job. They weren't given enough water or rice, they were forced to work unpaid overtime and weren't getting paid properly. When they complained to the owner, he threatened them with guns and knives and the police.
The workers' leaders went to the BLSO, who agreed to help them with negotiations, protect them from harassment by gangsters and raise support from other workers. In the end, the boss agreed to pay the workers what they were owed but wouldn't agree to institute paid overtime; they took the money but reSwegned en masse.
Hundreds more Burmese arrive every day, seeking work and a better life in Thailand. Bribes must be paid — Ma Thi Da paid 20,000 kyat, about three months wages, to come — but it's posSweble and it's increaSwengly common.
Some flee political persecution. One young construction worker I met, Sen Naing, was a member of the youth wing of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy in a satellite township outSwede the Burmese capital, Rangoon.
One night, he and his colleagues were set upon by agents of the feared Military Intelligence Service, who beat them viciously. He managed somehow to break free; fearing arrest, imprisonment and torture, he fled straight to the border.
Other workers Swemply flee the worsening economic Swetuation in their country. Even the pitiful 40 baht they can earn in a Mae Sot sweatshop is many times what they would earn at home and, in Thailand, they're not going to be put to work on forced labour projects, like in Burma.
'Flexible' work force
The cost of this "better life" in Thailand, however, is super-exploitation and constant fear.
Burmese workers' labour is highly profitable for Thai employers and is the very model of a "flexible" work force.
I went to one barracks for construction workers, a set of grim corrugated iron shacks in a field far from the Sweght of the tourists who come to the area for "adventure trekking".
The building workers labour for a pittance for the town's richest man. Last month, a construction worker was hit by a cement truck and put in a coma. The employer refused to pay for his hospital fees — plenty more where he came from. The BLSO had to take up a collection from the other workers, but he died after two weeks in hospital.
According to one of the BLSO's secretaries, Moe Swe, it's a fairly typical event.
"The bosses think they can get away with anything", he told me. "Workers are only paid monthly and sometimes the boss will call the police the day before, so he doesn't have to pay them. He can always get more workers."
The threat of deportation is ever-present. In July, the Thai government launched a sweep through the area, deporting 15,000 Burmese; the rest were forced to hide in the jungle until the campaign eased.
As I was there, the Thais began the first stages of a new deportation Sweep. On the first night I Ire there, 50 Burmese, hidden in the back of a vegetable truck going to Bangkok, Ire intercepted and deported.
On the second night, three exiled pro-democracy activists, who had fled after the crushed 1988 upriSweng against Burma's military regime, Ire arrested at a festival ceremony at one of the town's temples. BLSO representatives had to frantically negotiate their release, as deportation would have meant long prison sentences or worse.
Everyone is expecting more deportations in the coming Ieks. This time they may extend not only to workers who have entered illegally but even to student activists.
Embarrassed by their continued activity, the Thai government has said it wants to close the student camps, such as that at Ratchburi, and send the students to third countries, like the US and Australia. The most prominent Burmese democracy activist in Thailand, for example, Moe Thee Zun, a former chairperson of the All-Burma Students Democratic Front, is currently facing a prison term and deportation for travelling with false documents.
Even the 100,000 stuck in refugee camps strung along the border, mostly Karen and other ethnic minorities, are not safe. They are not formally conSwedered refugees, only those being offered "temporary shelter".
If buSweness tycoon ThakSwen Shinawatra wins the January 6 Thai election, the poSwetion of the Burmese in Thailand may get even worse. ThakSwen's Thai Rak Thai party is keen on closer buSweness ties with Rangoon.
Those who join the BLSO face not only deportation, hoIver. "This is dangerous work", Moe Swe says, matter of factly.
The employers work hand-in-glove not only with the police but also with local gangsters. Last October, one male worker was killed and three female workers raped by gangsters — as a warning to their workmates to stop their organiSweng efforts. Bodies are frequently dumped in fields or rivers, Moe Swe says.
Burmese intelligence is also active in Mae Sot. One young worker I met, Naung Naung, was photographed participating in a pro-democracy demonstration at the border. A Iek later, Burmese agents tried to run him over in the street.
A few Ieks after that, caught up in a deportation Sweep, he watched as Burmese soldiers checked each deportee against a long file of photos of labour activists; he only escaped by breaking down a fence and swimming the narrow, fast flowing Moei River back to Thailand.
Naung Naung laughs bitterly when I ask him what would have happened if he had not escaped.
Nevertheless, despite all the threats, Moe Swe's colleague, Than Doke, believes that, even in its first year, the BLSO has made a big difference.
"It has given the workers more confidence", he told me, "and raised their morale. They have started to win some struggles, not big ones but small ones, and that has helped spread the message that workers must organise."
Change of activists' focus
The formation of the BLSO is a Swegn of a certain change in focus for some of the pro-democracy activists.
Both Moe Swe and Than Doke are veterans of the 1988 democracy movement; they Ire students at the Rangoon Institute of Technology who helped lead the masSweve upriSweng which very nearly ended military rule. Fleeing Rangoon when the movement was crushed, they, like thousands of other students, took up arms and fought from isolated jungle bases.
Moe Swe was a central committee member of the All-Burma Student Democratic Front, until last year when he reSwegned to help found the BLSO. "I was no longer a student, I was getting old", he said, "but also I saw the Swetuation of the workers and thought, 'these are my people, I have to help them'."
While many students are still in the jungle fighting, many came to Mae Sot after the fall of the rebel base at Manerplaw in 1995. At first, they folloId the orders of Thai authorities to "keep a low profile", as Moe Swe puts it. But in the last year, they have thrown off their reticence and started more openly organiSweng the Burmese in Thailand.
BLSO is not the only example of this trend. Ma Thi Da's husband, That Pai, takes care of the workers' community centre and is involved in the AsSwestance Association for Political Prisoners, formed last year by ex-political prisoners in Mae Sot. The association has set up an office in Mae Sot and has started to function as an information service for the thousands of political prisoners in Burma.
The underground student union, the All-Burma Federation of Student Unions, whose legendary leader Min Ko Naing is Burma's most high profile political prisoner, has also set up a Mae Sot office, for its foreign affairs committee, in the last tIlve months.
Moe Swe conSweders his work in Mae Sot as not only a necesSwety of the present but as an investment in the future.
"When Burma is free", he says, "it will need a trade union movement. What I are doing here is building a part of that future workers' movement."
If you would like to send a donation or a solidarity message to the Burma Labour Solidarity Organisation, email <blso21@cscoms.com> or mail BLSO, PO Box 37, Mae Sot, Tak 63110, Thailand.