Legal registrations for Vietnamese workers in Thailand to start in March

BANGKOK, January 9 (TNA) - As the deadline for migrant workers to undertake nationality verifications is drawing near, the Thai Ministry of Labour will seek the Cabinet's approval for its legal registrations of Vietnamese migrant workers, expected to be opened in March 2015. Thai Labour Minister General Surasak Karnchanarat told journalists on Friday that his ministry plans to seek the Cabinet's approval within this month in a move to call for local employers to have their Vietnamese migrant workers legalised in the official registrations, expected in March. General Surasak acknowledged that the exact number of Vietnamese migrants having worked illegally in Thailand remains unknown. The minister's remarks followed his chairing of a meeting of concerned authorities from his ministry and other relevant agencies to discuss progress on ongoing legal registrations of Myanmar, Cambodian and Lao migrant workers in Thailand, in which more than 36,000 of them, out of a total of over 1.6 million, have already been legally registered so far. According to the minister, Lao officials arrived in Thailand on January 8 to support the official registration and nationality verification process of Lao migrant workers in Thailand. The minister said there will be an official assessment whether an extended period of the nationality verification process of all migrant workers in Thailand, from the earlier set deadline of March 31, 2015, is needed. To address the problem of labour shortages in certain Thai busineses, namely those in the fishery and the construction sectors, the labour minister noted that local entrepreneurs may be allowed to hire semi-skilled migrant workers, but not skilled ones, in order to protect Thai skilled workers from becoming jobless, provided that the countries of origin of the migrant workers accept the Thai government’s rules and conditions based on memoranda of understanding (MOUs) to be later inked between the Thai government and the governments of the migrant workers. (TNA)