Thailand aims to employ army of 150,000 migrant workers to solve labour shortage

Thailand is looking to bring in more labourers from neighbouring countries with the help of recruitment agencies, as the government seeks to employ an army of around 150,000 foreign workers to make up for the country’s low percentage of people willing to do manual labour jobs. But the general public is worried about the clutter and spread of Covid-19 from migrant workers, sparking a debate about immigration procedures.

The labour ministry is attempting to solve the shortage in labour in two ways. The first is to use the labour memorandum of understanding procedure, or MoU, to bring in people from three neighbhouring nations to work for Thai companies, according to the director-general of the Department of Employment, Pairoj Chotikasathien.

Thailand employers have already used the MoU platform to apply to recruit nearly 168,00 workers, requesting approximately 117,000 people from…