Thai Trade Unions Joint Meeting for Strengthening Youth and Women Leadership and for Consolidated Labour Movement in Thailand

The meeting is for the trade unions in Thailand to assess the unions' policies as well as indentifiying most urgent issue to jointly work on. It is for strengthing the youth and women leadership for consolidated labour movement in Thailand. 1) Reviewing key challenges at enterprise/workplace level due to COVID crisis, building consensus on way forward for follow up actions for enterprise sustainability and workers welfare; 2) Capacity building for workplace cooperation for productivity and decent work and grievances handling at enterprise level;

Thailand has made remarkable progress in social and economic development, moving from a low-income to an upper-income country in less than a generation. Labour movement in Thailand, however, shows slow development mainly due to lack of consolidate activities and movement among the unions, regardless of urgent needs that unions have to work together and hard to tackle the new challenges by the impact of COVID-19.

There are 13 registered national unions under the Labour Regulation Act although less than 2 % of the workforce is organized into trade unions. ILO mainly works with ITUC-TC (Thai Council), composed of State Enterprises Workers’ Relations Confederation (SERC), Labour Congress of Thai Labour (LCT), Thai Trade Union Congress (TTUC), and National Congress Private Industrial of Employees (NCPE). Almost 20 years will pass since the ITUC-TC establishment but rarely see collaborative work by themselves.

The unions that ILO works with has various challenges in;
  • Capacity in organizing.
  • Collaborative work among them to have consolidate voice for social dialogue.
  • Youth and women leadership and representativeness.
  • Communication and coordination.