Will westerners on work permits be kicked out of Thailand?

[Arthur Daley]

With this in today's news

Thailand may lose up to 14.4 million jobs in the second and third quarters, largely because of the coronavirus outbreak and widespread drought, says the government’s planning unit.

meaning one heck of a lot of professional office staff are going to become unemployed, why would Thailand allow firms including BOI to carry on employing foreigners? I see a mass culling ahead as work permit renewals become due.

[Pat]

A few are putting on a brave face. I doubt many teflers got paid since schools closed. I read theres a lot of filipinos hungry in the Nonthaburi area

a lot of teflers having parties end of july if schools open on schedule

[Arthur Daley]

I don't think all TEFLers will be culled as there aren't enough Thais with great English skills willing to work for those crap salaries. I think the main targets will be the several thousand Westerners with office jobs, mostly in Bangkok but elsewhere too. With hundreds if not thousands of businesses going bust you're going to have a huge number of highly educated Thai professionals needing jobs, and any company wanting to employ foreigners instead is going to face extremely tough if not impossible criteria.

That includes BOI in my opinion which have always had things easier in order to encourage them to set up in Thailand but once set up they're very unlikely to go to the expense of relocating out of Thailand simply because they're told they have to replace their foreigners with Thais.

[serrollt]

The idle slackers who spend their working hours on social media, will be weeded out - about time.

[Arthur Daley]

Yep apparently any foreigner who wasn't crucial was weeded out following the 1997 crash. There are very few jobs in Thailand that can't be done by a Thai these days, and multinationals posting westerners into the country is becoming much less common.

With perhaps tens of thousands of highly educated and experienced Thai professionals about to be on the jobs market (I know of one, a head of legal at a hotel chain which seems unlikely to survive) having "We don't want a Thai running our office or have to deal with one every day, so we need a whitey overseer" pleaded isn't likely to go down too well with work permit officials.

[Pat]

So tougher job for these whitey overseers to get a work permit

[Arthur Daley]

Wiki sums up the role well

Overseer


On larger plantations an overseer represented the planter in matters of daily management. Usually perceived as uncouth, ill-educated, and low-class, he had the difficult and often despised task of middleman and the often contradictory goals of fostering both productivity and the wellfare of the enslaved work-force.^[66]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan...United_States#

[Arthur Daley]

A Brit I know has lost his maths teaching job to a Filipino paid half his salary.

[Pat]

^ Add to that too pricey to fly home, no pay the last few months, a lot of teachers at their wits end

[Arthur Daley]

The second of three long-term expats working in Thailand (office-based) that I know just told me that she's being made redundant.

[Frokus]

I think you will be fine, especially if you're working a volunteer job for one of the Thailand charities. There's lots of volunteer remote jobs you can see on job-seeking websites, so finding one that suits you is a good way to get into Thailand for living and finding a regular job. You will also save quite a lot since you won't have to go anywhere.

[TheRealKW]

Jeeze, why the sneering about English teachers? It's unseemly.

[TAXEXILE]

unseemly.

as are most of the state school teflers plying their trade in thailand.

forced to "take the knee" to the thai flag every morning, treated as outcasts by the thai staff and trying to teach thai kids a language that most of them either have no interest in learning or are just lacking the intelligence to learn.

barrel scraping c listers with little chance of finding work back in their home countries with "thailand" on their cv's.

they would be better off working the machines in a metal factory up north.

[TheRealKW]

as are most of the state school teflers plying their trade in thailand.

forced to "take the knee" to the thai flag every morning, treated as outcasts by the thai staff and trying to teach thai kids a language that most of them either have no interest in learning or are just lacking the intelligence to learn.

barrel scraping c listers with little chance of finding work back in their home countries with "thailand" on their cv's.

they would be better off working the machines in a metal factory up north.

or perhaps teaching dental nurses English at a language school, eh, tax?

[Ergenburgensmurgen]

or perhaps teaching dental nurses English at a language school, eh, tax?

Hey, taxi taught English to bankers and scientists don'tcha know!

No low-class TEFLing for him. He even received free food for it too!