As Thais suffer and watch foreign investors flee their country for other Asian nations which offer cheaper labour forces, they are getting a taste of how little respect globalisation has for the rights of working people. This has nothing to do with the lovable cartoon characters themselves. In mid-1996 Eden sacked Nangnuth and 700 others after they protested against its strategy of cutting jobs and subcontracting to cheaper workers in rural Thailand and abroad. They were also demanding better working conditions. The Eden Group's behaviour is a classic example of how little respect the process of globalisation has for the rights of working people,' says Chin Thaplee, chair- man of the National Employees Council, a federation of Thai private sector trade unions.
Many commentators blame Thailand's current high unemployment on the Asian financial crisis.
Foreign investors first poured money into Thailand to take advantage of its cheap labour and when countries like China and Vietnam opened up with even cheaper labour they started moving out in droves, creating conditions for an overall loss of international confidence and the subsequent financial crisis,' says Lae Dilokvidyarat, a labour economist with Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University. By the end of 1998 there were an estimated two million jobless Thais out of a total workforce of 30 million. Using cheap labour worked well for several years for foreign investors, especially in the labour-intensive garment, footwear and toy manufacturing industries. Investors from Europe, North America and other Asian 'tiger' economies queued up, drooling at Thailand's low wages, tax incentives, and tight controls on trade union organising. But by the mid-1990s the steady value of the Thai baht against the US dollar and rising minimum wages meant Thai labour had become too expensive for global operators.