Workers, bosses get fiscal relief-Geotextiles

Workers, bosses get fiscal relief
Bid to ease financial woes of flood victims

Published: 1/12/2011 at 12:00 AM
Newspaper section: News

The Social Security Fund has decided to cut the contributions of flood-affected employers and workers to the fund and lend money at low fixed interest rates to struggling business operators next year.

Its in the bag

Volunteers and staff from Unilever Thailand help pack relief bags at the Thai-Japanese stadium in Din Daeng yesterday. More than 300,000 bags, worth about 100 million baht, contain items produced by the company to be donated to flood victims under a campaign called Unilever TakeUHome. THITI WANNAMONTHA

Somkiat Chayasriwong, permanent secretary for labour and SSF chairman, yesterday said the cut will be applied on contributions from both employers and employees to ease their financial burden in the wake of the flood crisis.

From January to June next year, the contributions to the fund from the two parties will be lowered to 3% from the normal rate of 5% of employees' salaries. The contribution rate for July and December will be adjusted to 4%.

The government will maintain its contribution to the fund at the equivalent of 2.75% of employees' salaries.

BMA raises four sluice gates

The SSF will also provide loans worth 10 billion baht to boost the liquidity of flood-affected business operators.

The loans will be available from Jan 1 next year with 3% interest fixed for three years for borrowers with collateral and 5% interest fixed for three years for borrowers without collateral.

Operators with up to 50 employees can borrow up to one million baht each. Those with 51-200 workers may borrow up to 2 million baht and those with 201 employees or more can borrow up to 4 million baht.

The operators who are eligible for the loans must employ workers who have been members of the SSF for at least three months. They can seek the loans through three banks _ Krung Thai Bank, Government Savings Bank and Islamic Bank of Thailand.

The Labour Ministry will seek cabinet approval for it to issue regulations detailing the assistance under the scheme,Lurking danger of flood-damaged buildings-sheep fence, Mr Somkiat said.

Meanwhile, workers of flooded factories especially in Ayutthaya and Pathum Thani province are concerned about their job security because they wonder if their employers can resume running their businesses. However, authorities expect the flood impact on employment to be short-lived.

The concern is serious for workers at the Saha Rattana Nakorn Industrial Estate in Ayutthaya and the Nava Nakorn Industrial Estate in Pathum Thani as the compounds still remain at least one metre under water. There are more than 400 factories in both industrial estates but operators are still unable to salvage their plants and employment concerns have arisen for more than 170,000 people who worked there.

Many workers gathered at the entrance of the Nava Nakorn Industrial Estate in Khlong Luang district of Pathum Thani yesterday to inquire about the status of their workplaces. They are uncertain if their factories will resume production and if they will still be employed.

They said that some employers paid them 50% to 75% of their salaries during the flooding, but other employers had laid off workers.

Suthasinee Kaeoleklai, labour relief coordinator in Ayutthaya and nearby provinces, said workers at flooded industrial estates were in deep trouble because they lived in rented rooms while local administrators gave relief bags only to people with house registrations in their areas.

As they are ineligible to receive relief bags,铜包钢电焊网, the workers do not have enough food to eat while their salaries were cut during the flooding.

Some employers lured workers into resigning from their jobs during flooding by claiming that voluntary resignation would guarantee their re-employment in the future.

"Actually the voluntary resignation deprives the workers of unemployment compensation,Concerns, floodwaters rise in Bangkok-Black Wire Cloth,welded wire pannel," Ms Suthasinee said.

"Nearly 100,000 workers at the Nava Nakorn Industrial Estate are faced with this problem."

Mr Somkiat said more than 14,000 workplaces remain flooded. These factories employ more than 660,Geotextiles,000 workers.

Thirty-one enterprises have laid off nearly 10,000 people and 11 more companies are likely to follow suit by laying off another 2,600 workers.

Most flood-affected enterprises will resume their business and recruit workers again. The Labour Ministry has prepared 150,000 jobs for the workers who cannot return to their companies.

The Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board said medium- and large-scale industries in Ayutthaya and Pathum Thani have suspended production since Oct 8. They make high-technology products, automobiles and electronic products.

Production halts have also taken place at industrial estates that face flood risks in Bangkok. The situation affects about 380,000 workers in the three provinces. The flooding this year also affected 600,000 foreign workers in deluge-hit provinces as a whole.

Factory and machine repairs and salvage will take one to three months while automotive and electronic industries will take six months to resume.

Employment will drop both in production and service sectors. Impacts are relatively serious on self-employed people, sub-contractor and daily workers.

The office said the unemployment rate will rise to 1.8-2.3% in the last quarter of this year, equivalent to 730,000 to 920,000 people compared with 0.7% during the past three quarters.

Military Barriers/Hesco Bastions

Information

The QIAOSHI's Military Barriers or Hesco Bastions is a modern gabion used for flood control and military fortification. It is made of a collapsible metal wire mesh container and heavy duty fabric liner,Don Mueang airport dry-hesco bastion, and used as a temporary to semi-permanent dike or barrier against blast or small-arms. One of the less heralded life- and labor-saving devices of war, it is used on nearly every United States Military base in Iraq as well as on NATO bases in Afghanistan.

Originally designed for use on beaches and marshes for erosion and flood control, the Hesco Bastion quickly became a popular security device in the 1990s.

Assembly
Assembling the Hesco Bastion entails unfolding it and (if available) using a front end loader to fill it with sand, dirt or gravel. The placement of the barrier is generally very similar to the placement of a sandbag barrier or earth berm except that room must generally be allowed for the equipment used to fill the barrier. The main advantage of Military Barrier, strongly contributing to their popularity with troops and flood fighters, is the quick and easy setup. Previously, people had to fill sandbags, a slow undertaking, with one worker filling about 20 sandbags per hour. Workers using Military Barrier and a front end loader can do ten times the work of those using sandbags.
The Hesco Barrier come in a variety of sizes. Most of the barriers can also be stacked, and they are shipped collapsed in compact sets. Example dimensions of typical configurations are 46" x 36" x 32 (1.4m x 1.1m x 9.8m) to 7 x 5 x 100 (2.1m x 1.5m x 30m).
A new system of Hesco Bastion developed specially for military use is deployed from a container, which is dragged along the line of ground where the barrier is to be formed, unfolding up to several hundred meters of barrier in minutes, ready for filling with soil by a backhoe.

Protection
Filled with sand, 60 centimetres (24 inches) of barrier thickness will stop rifle bullets and shell fragments. It takes 1.5 metres (five feet) of thickness to prevent penetration by a rocket propelled grenade round. Approximately 1.2 metres (four feet) of thickness provides protection against most car bombs.

Specification