Charit Meesit

Charit Meesidhi is educating Thai workers about their legal rights and providing them with legal advocacy assistance to ensure that these rights are upheld. Ultimately he hopes to help them build a strong labor community that can press for new labor laws that will help improve the quality of the Thai worker's life and his or her position in society.

Charit helps workers understand what their legal rights are and teaches them how to defend these rights within the legal system. Beyond this, he is establishing centers to provide counseling, legal advocacy, and direct access to professional legal assistance for those workers whose rights are being violated. These one-on-one and group interventions not only provide workers with remedies for their individual grievances, but they raise the workers I morale and confidence and build a sense of community. From this base, Charit hopes in the long term to encourage and facilitate workers' participation in advocacy for enacting new laws or amending existing laws in ways that benefit them. He will also provide forums where workers can actively take part in developing new approaches to solving grievances and to improving their quality of life through legal and other measures.

The majority of workers in Thailand are not aware of their legal rights or the possibility of pursuing legal remedies to protect their rights. Even those workers who are aware of their rights have no access to professional legal assistance to help them enforce their rights through the courts and other legal measures.

As a result, employers (particularly large firms) disregard laws designed to protect the rights of the employee, and workers are being exploited. As international and internal competition become increasingly fierce, employers are more and more willing to take advantage of workers and ignore existing labor laws in order to gain an edge on their competitors and pad their profit margins.

Few lawyers choose to specialize in labor law, and law schools and training programs give students little exposure to this field. Legal aid for workers has thus far been limited to educational programs and consoling on current laws, but little has been done to provide workers with the means to seek legal redress when their rights are violated.

Charit has begun by conducting informal and participatory study groups and training on worker’s rights directly in the workplace. He has also established consultative meetings to help workers prepare complaints and as a forum for workers to exchange views and brainstorm possible solutions to existing problems.

Charit is providing training in labor law to a network of lawyers who will help individual workers pursue legal cases. Drawing upon this network, he plans to provide permanent legal advisors for each individual trade union and to establish drop-in legal aid centers for workers in each industrial zone.

In the longer term, Charit will coordinate with citizen groups, labor organizations, and academics to amend laws and undertake advocacy campaigns on larger issues affecting workers throughout the country.

Charit has been involved in the Thai labor movement for more than ten years, working to amend laws, negotiating contracts, mediating disputes, and lobbying government agencies and law makers for better laws and implementation. He has been instrumental in securing the right to paid maternal leave for workers and the introduction and implementation of the Social Security Act.