Here comes the social fallout of the crisis

5 August 1998

On the TV news the other night, the lead stories were: a jailbreak by amphetamine dealers; the discovery in Bangkok of illegal arms destined for Burmese rebels; the follow-up to a high-profile murder; and accusations about who got the illegal Salween logs.

Among the top stories, there was no space for the IMF, the prime minister, the Cambodian election, the cobra faction, the national games, the crisis, or the goodness of humanity. All were squeezed out by one theme: piracy.

In the few days before and after that night, the top stories also included: the trade of stolen automobiles into Indochina; a couple caught trafficking girls to the Taipei sex trade; smuggling of luxury yachts and cars; and the kidnap of people on Bangkok streets to work in sweatshops and brothels.

Many people are worried about the social fallout of the crisis. The Thai Melon affair has signalled that layoffs are now running at thousands per week. What will happen when the final pay-packets run out? Will people riot, protest, support General Chavalit, revolt? The news is beginning to give us the answer. They will become pirates.

The World Bank and the IMF are talking a lot about "social safety nets". This is a new phrase, a new piece of international-organisation-speak. It has been invented to meet the criticism that crisis bailout programmes save the rich at the expense of the poor. Like most pieces of international-organisation-speak, it probably won’t be with us for long (remember "basic needs"? "social exclusion"? "poverty planning"?) But in the short term, the organisations are throwing a lot of money at the phrase. It will make the organisations feel better.

The press, both local and international, wants to know how many people are "unemployed". Under pressure, ministers and officials blurt out figures. Day on day, these figures fluctuate by alarming amounts. That’s because they signify nothing. With no welfare system, "unemployment" is a meaningless concept.

In Bangkok over the last year, the informal sector has grown at double-digit rates. At night the pavements are transformed into an enormous food and retail complex. Both buyers and sellers have shifted down a step—moving out of the shopping malls onto the street where the overheads are cheaper. A little further upmarket, new service businesses are multiplying. Laundry outlets. Car washes. Tuition.

These are urban ways of sharing impoverishment. Fewer people have a regular formal income. But more of the income is shared out to those who have lost their jobs through the payment for a bowl of noodles, a cheap T-shirt, or a clean car.

Others survive by climbing down the employment ladder. Bangkok has a whole new breed of polite and well-dressed taxi-drivers. They learnt their manners and their dress code in their previous employment—in a bank, finance company, or similar.

But as they climb down the ladder, they force others off the bottom rungs. Nobody knows how many have drifted back to the villages to share in the family rice bowl. For some like many of the ex-taxi-drivers, going home may not be too difficult. They always rotated between city and village on a short-term rhythm: plant rice; drive taxi; harvest rice; drive taxi; plant rice; and so on.

But there is another group which finds it much more difficult to go home. They left the village at the age of 14, 15, or 16. When times were good, they could always find work in the city. They did not rotate back and forth. They have now been away for ten or more years. They have graduated from the unofficial university of Bangkok life. They don’t know how to plant paddy, or they simply don’t want to. Many prefer to hang around in the city. If they do go back to the village, they try to survive by applying what they have learned in the city: selling amphetamines, selling their sisters.

But these strategies to share impoverishment through small-scale entrepreneurship and going home have their limits. What happens when those limits are reached? Will the unfortunate get together and make trouble?

At the base of society, there is not much in the way of organisation to manage either welfare or protest. The huge, disorienting migration shifts of the last two decades have undermined traditional structures of family and village. Officials still discourage and obstruct efforts to form new kinds of organisation among the poor, especially in the rural areas.

When times are tough, there is one conventional route. You go to see the chao pho (godfather) or pho liang (patron). You ask him for help, ask him for a job. He has his stable of legitimate businesses (hotels, gas stations, contracting) but they too are stunned by the crisis. He usually has some revenue from his political posts (provincial council) and connections (vote-banking), but this income stream may even have turned negative. So he falls back on the businesses which can still deliver a reasonable revenue at lower turnover because the margins are high. Piracy, in various forms. Trading in drugs, guns, logs, flesh, contraband.

The government (and its IMF partners) have been too taken up with illusions: the six-month turn-around; the return of confidence; a V-shaped recovery; social safety nets; and the capacity of the minister of labour to handle the social consequences of the crisis. Now reality is breaking though. The crisis is going to be with us for a long time. You cannot create social protection overnight. You cannot expect much from a labour ministry when it has always been considered of minor status, and has usually served as parking spot for weaker ministerial candidates. An employment policy also needs the involvement of the ministries of industry and agriculture. But these ministries hardly have a record of social vision.

Leaders like to repeat the mantra that Thailand is a harmonious society without major divisions along lines of race or religion. But perhaps the important division is between the lawful and the lawless. Perhaps the social fallout of the crisis will not be the food riots expected in Indonesia, or the constant street demonstrations seen in Korea, but rather a creeping increase in piracy.

Stay tuned to the news.

All these ministries must get together to solve this problem and quick before Thailand turn a country of pirates where no one wants to come and invest.