Thai government attempts to make employers more accountable for their immigrant workers, notably from Burma, is forcing labor underground and may jeopardize their human rights, a conference of NGOs in Bangkok heard Friday.

The conference, organized by the Office of the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand (NHRCT), heard that only around 152,000 workers from Burma, Laos and Cambodia had been registered this year, compared with 1.2 million last year. This is because employers had shied away from the risk of paying higher registration and deposit fees.

The conference agreed to petition the Bangkok government to revise its policies on migrant labor registration in favor of workers rather than employers and state administrators.

Sunee Chairot, from NHRCT, told The Irrawaddy that many immigrant workers, the bulk of them from Burma, had gone underground working illegally as a result anticipated government migrant worker policy changes.

The government resolved at end of last year to make employers pay an additional deposit of between 10,000 ($250) and 50,000 baht ($1,250) for each worker, but abandoned this after numerous protests. For the present, employers still have to register their foreign workers but pay only the old permit fee of 3,800 baht (approximately US $100) for each worker. However, many employers feared that the government would introduce higher fees and so in effect were “hiding” their workers, NGOs said.

Pranom Somwong from the Migrant Assistance Program (MAP) said there was a risk of higher deposit fees encouraging employers to in effect imprison their registered workers to ensure they did not leave and trigger a deposit forfeit. “The deposit money policy could be a cause of forced labour because the employer may be scared that their workers will leave,” Pranom said.

Only 152,000 migrant workers have been registered with the Department of Employment this year: 114,551 are Burmese, 16,888 from Laos and 20,580 Cambodians. Last year the total was about 1.2 million.