Labour and Modes of Participation in Thailand

Abstract

This article reflects upon the dynamics of regime change in Thailand through a focus on the politics of the urban industrial working class. It identifies and examines recent efforts to accommodate labour interests via new modes of political participation that cast workers in the role of ‘customers’ of a range of services offered by an ostensibly neutral, accountable, and transparent state apparatus. It is argued that the establishment of these new technocratic modes of political participation embodies an attempt to manage labour tensions in ways that bypass and further undermine notions of representation and associated institutional frameworks that have historically been linked to collective class-based action and organization. The account locates this endeavour to recast labour's mode of political participation in the broader context of Thailand's ongoing entanglement in neo-liberal globalisation, transformations in the structure of the industrial working class, the political marginalization of the state-sanctioned labour movement, and the attempt by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the Thai Rak Thai Party to reshape Thailand's political economy during the period 2001–2006.