Olivia Spektner
Cultural Anthropology
Liana Padilla-Wilson
2/22/2013
Thai Women
Thailand is a small country located near Vietnam and adjacent to Cambodia Malaysia and Laos, its population is sixty seven million. The region of Bangkok is a hotspot for tourism known for its amazing beaches, wild parties and incredibly luxurious hotels. But what these tourist never see is the heavily industrialized export minded back bone of Bangkok and the workers who fuel it. From throughout Thailand rural workers migrate to Bangkok, known as the “City of Angels” to work in its factories, on products to almost exclusively be exported out of the country. The products that these people, largely women work to make are too expensive for they themselves to buy, instead these products go zooming back across the globe to the country that offshored its work, to factory where it only had to pay the workers a fraction of what the global corporations would be forced to pay if the work was to be done in the same country to which its products were intended to be bought and sold.
But these factories aren’t sweat shops, they don’t utilize forced labor or child workers, the hours these women work aren’t wholly unreasonable. “The reason that global corporations choose to manufacture in Thailand is no secret. A Third World standard of living leads to ultra-cheap labor costs. The best paid workers in this Bangkok factory make all of $25 per week. I can picture the rotund British businessman in Hong Kong explaining to us the reason the labor force in places like Thailand and China is valued: ‘They work 10 or 12 hours per day, and they don’t complain.’” In the Princeton article by Greg Ayres. And like the article says, these women don’t complain, for them this is a good job, worth traveling far from home and living in quarters with many other women. The jobs allows these women to experience modern life and travel, something unheard of in the not too distant past of Thailand. This break of tradition was a source of conflict where the women’s mobility challenged centuries of customs where the women were subservient, and now it was they who set out to work in the big city, there centuries of customs and tradition made the perfect worker, always compliant and complaining very little. These changes to the traditional gender roles in combination with the economic and political evolutions of Thailand’s mad dash of international relevancy has thrown its culture into upheaval. Tradition can be made anew and the culture of Thailand is changing and it is highly interesting the means of its change, to what end? Time will tell.
One of the reasons for this change in the economy of Thailand came from the lasting effects of NAFTA. NAFTA or the North American Free Trade Agreement was brought to life in 1994, and brought about free trade between the United States, Canada and Mexico where before the tariffs (a tax on goods coming into or leaving a country) each country employed were obscenely high. After NAFTA tariffs, before commonplace in many industrialized countries fell in popularity and free trade agreements spread like an epidemic, and offshoring to countries that had little to no labor laws became a huge temptation to many U.S. corporations. Soon trade deals were being struck in every corner of the world, and the U.S. job market was being slowly chipped away at, people lost their jobs because it was cheaper to do it somewhere else. To this day global corporation hunt seek out the countries with the cheapest labor, “the businessmen keep their factories running here as long as the labor remains cheap. If not, they move elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The company that owns this Bangkok factory recently closed a facility in Taiwan because labor costs had crept up above a mere 5 percent of product value” says Greg Ayres, a Princeton graduate glimpsing the factories in Thailand for the first time. NAFTA did a lot to help trade and bolster the American economy, but its lasting effect of trade policies caused an unhealthy shift where big corporation could exploit the labor laws of far off countries.
The book portrays a vast difference in the culture of the “big city” Bangkok and how the Rural Baan Naa Sakea situated far from it, with its dirt roads and rice fields, in rural life family is very important, many of the young women who leave bound for Bangkok do it in the with the intention to send the money back, to provide for the family in a way that women have never been able to do before. In stark contrast Bangkok is the very epitome of modernity kwaam pen thansamay, “being up to date” and you would think to seem very adventures to any young man or women with the chance to go there. The controversy of the idea of gender in there society seems to be very radically changing with women leaving their rural homes and become mobile, leaving to the big city where there submissive upbringing has made them into the perfect factory workers. “Almost all the migrant women I came to know spoke of desires to help rural kin as a part of why they came to Bangkok” Mary Beth Mills says in Thai Women, very few ever said that their families were a part of this decision however, many families were openly opposed to their daughters setting out on their own, the choice that these Thai Women made seems to differ greatly from the way they were brought up, which leaves you to wonder, why are they leaving home? Every story will differ slightly, but it will be interesting to hear the specific reasons why these girls did something seemingly so counter cultural.
The break these from the old way and stepping into modernity so common in the lives of young rural women in Thailand is viewed in a positive light, bringing in revenue for the family seems to be a welcome change, a chance for the rural communities to purchase commodity items like electronics and western clothing, but some viewed the change with much skepticism or even outright hostility, perhaps because of the idea of the rampant sex trade that flourishes in Bangkok that brings in so many young women and not wanting to be associated with it, very different than the kind of work that these women seek. Still these jobs give the women a chance to set out on their own, to live their own lives and experience a life in the city that before, was totally out of reach. These newly found freedoms must come as an amazing adventure and wonderful opportunity, something hard to pass up for the women of Thailand.

Work Cited
Ayres, Greg. "A Personal Glimpse of the Factory Laborers in Thailand." (n.d.): n. pag. The Daily Princetonian. Princeton, 27 Mar. 1998. Web. 2 Feb. 2016.
Mills, Mary Beth. Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1999. Print.