No more registrations for immigrant workers

The Labour Ministry's Department of Employment (DoE) will not open new registrations for immigrant workers currently in Thailand, DoE chief Jeerasak Sukhonthachat said yesterday.

Instead, to solve the country's labour shortage, the DoE aims to open up channels for the legal immigration of Burmese labourers, speeding up the nationality identification process for the remaining worker applicants, he said.

The Federation of Thai Industries - fearing a shortage of 300,000 workers in various industries - had called for another round of registration after the Songkran holidays, fearing there would be no more such registrations this year.

The estimated shortage of workers matched the number of immigrants who had failed to apply for the nationality ID process earlier, he said. Some 1.3 million workers had applied for the process. While speeding up the registration process for the remaining applicants, the DoE would also allow immigration of workers to make up for the projected shortage of labour, Jeerasak said. The DoE had contacted Burma to send the first batch of 20,000 workers to Thailand.

Employers wishing to retain workers they had hired earlier could send them back home and then give their names to the DoE. It would contact the workers' countries to return the workers to Thailand legally.

So far, 70,000 workers have completed the Burmese nationality ID process. Three checkpoints providing the service had lifted their daily applications intake from 600 to 1,000, he said. Thai authorities had urged Burma to provide sufficient staff to handle the increased daily workload, he added.