Good afternoon,

Up to 40,000 permanent workers in the auto parts industries are facing job losses as car production has plummeted in the kingdom in response to the global economic problems. This is separate from the sub-contractor or temporary workers, who have already faced freezes on jobs and who have much less job security in any case. The Labour Ministry is requesting one billion baht to put half of these workers into new skills training schemes but the other half are going to be abandoned – well, the phrase is ‘be expected to be able to shift into other industries.’ The skills schemes seem to be aimed at providing 5,000 baht per month allowance and retraining so that workers can take up the same jobs when the economy picks up – it sounds like make-busy work to keep people off the official unemployment rate but perhaps they will be able to learn something new from each other.

The army-appointed government is also planning a so-called Plan B to promote long-term competitiveness of the Thai economy (I remember what they said when Thai Rak Thai was trying to do something much more rigorous and useful half a dozen years ago). It is not clear, to me at least, how much they are planning to spend on specific measures, how progress will be monitored, what criteria will be employed to select industries and so forth. Perhaps it is just the very poor nature of general Thai journalism but all of the government’s plans appear to be vague and poorly planned – like this talk of tax cuts and this of promoting the ‘Sufficiency Economy Fund.’ All those lies spread about ‘buying votes’ in the countryside by the right wing and now suddenly everything is different.

The truth about the Quisling becomes increasingly apparent to everyone. Not only does he reject Amnesty reports about torture, now he is taking the army’s line about not mistreating the Rohingya refugees. At least the international media will have the opportunity of taking a better measure of his character than they have done so far.

Back tomorrow at some stage.