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Migrant Workers Facebook Post Inspires Landmark Labour Case in Thailand

Myanmar migrant worker Tun Tun Win, 24, and his wife Ye Ye, 30, pose before an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation in Bangkok, Thailand, September 2, 2016. Picture taken September 2, 2016.   REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom

Myanmar migrant worker Tun Tun Win, 24, and his wife Ye Ye, 30, pose before an interview with Reuters in Bangkok – Photo Chaiwat Subprasom

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BANGKOK – Tun Tun Win and his co-workers from Myanmar thought life was fine at the Thammakaset chicken farm in central Thailand, where they reared hundreds of thousands of birds for export to the European Union.

The migrants clocked 20 hours a day for 40 days straight, shovelling litter and culling the sick among the birds as they grew from chicks to poultry for slaughter.

Then 10-hour days for three weeks cleaning the warehouse-sized coops at the Thammakaset chicken farm in Lopburi province.

And finally they got three days off.

All that work for what they figured was a fair wage: nearly $7 a day, with free rent and electricity.

“We thought our employer was a nice guy because he gave us rooms, and we didn’t have to pay rent,” Tun Tun Win said. “We stayed for free, and we got our money.”

More than 3 million migrants work in Thailand, the vast majority from neighbouring Myanmar, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Myanmar migrant worker Tun Tun Win, 24, uses his mobile phone as his wife Ye Ye, 30, looks on before an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation in Bangkok, Thailand - Photo -Chaiwat Subprasom

Myanmar migrant worker Tun Tun Win, 24, uses his mobile phone as his wife Ye Ye, 30, looks on before an interview with Reuters – Photo -Chaiwat Subprasom

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Many are exploited on farms and in factories across the country, facing an uphill battle for compensation and justice against multi-tiered corporate supply chains, rights groups say.

That’s if they even know they’re being exploited in the first place.

It was a smartphone and a Facebook post that opened Tun Tun Win’s eyes to the severity of his work conditions – and led to a landmark lawsuit pitting migrant workers against a corporation at the top of the food chain.

The case highlights widespread ignorance among both workers and employers about labour rights, and workplace norms seen as violations in the closely scrutinised global supply chain.

Tun Tun Win, 24, uses his mobile phone before an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation in Bangkok.

Tun Tun Win, 24, uses his mobile phone before an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation in Bangkok.

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It all began last year after Tun Tun Win bought a new phone, and a “chicken doctor”, one of the farm’s veterinarians, introduced him to social media.

Lying in bed next to his wife one night, he saw a post about tuna plant workers from Myanmar who had been overworked and underpaid. They had received more than $1 million in an unprecedented settlement in March.

The Facebook post by the local non-profit Migrant Worker Rights Network (MWRN) inspired Tun Tun Win and 13 co-workers to take action.

In a lawsuit filed at a labour court earlier this month following unsuccessful negotiations with the company and local authorities, they are demanding $1.3 million in compensation and civil damages.

The suit alleges forced overtime, unlawful salary deductions, passport confiscation and limited freedom of movement.

Crucially, the action is against both Thammakaset and the buyer of the farm’s poultry – agricultural giant Betagro, which exports food worldwide.

“TEST CASE”

Andy Hall, a prominent British human rights activist in Thailand who has consulted on several cases involving migrants, said the litigation was an important test case.

Myanmar workers seeking compensation from Betagro Group in Bangkok.

Myanmar workers seeking compensation from Betagro Group in Bangkok.

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“We’re trying to hold Betagro responsible for the system of contract farming,” he said. “If we can, it will have huge implications for contract farming and the responsibility of corporate supply chains across Thailand.”

Part of the workers’ evidence includes pictures snapped on Tun Tun Win’s phone and shared on Facebook, including time-stamped cards – one showing a worker clocking in on May 24 at 6:54, out at 17:00, in again at 19:02, then out at 5:37.

That’s a total of 20 hours and 41 minutes.

In an interview, Thammakaset owner Chanchai Pheamphon said he had not fully understood the requirements under Thai law and agreed he had underpaid staff as well as illegally deducting rent and utilities from their daily wages.

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But he denied charges of forced labour or limiting employees’ freedom of movement, and said he planned to file a counter defamation suit against the workers and MWRN.

“I’m now facing bankruptcy,” he told Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding that a decision by Betagro to halt business with Thammakaset amid the controversy had forced him to shut his 1.6 million-chicken, three-farm operation and lay off nearly 100 employees.

“This NGO (MWRN) wants more money for these 14 workers, but what about the 100 others?” he said. “The world has already found me guilty, and they have stopped buying my goods. They’ve already sentenced me to death.”

Betagro, one of Thailand’s largest meat producers and exporters, also denied the workers’ allegations.

“There were no violations of human rights or anything resembling forced labour, as defined by the law on prevention and suppression of human trafficking,” it said in a statement.

Other than the statement, Betagro did not respond to email and phone requests for an interview.

ABUSE AND IGNORANCE

Supply chains for goods such as food, clothing and electronics usually begin in countries with the cheapest labour.

Thailand has been at the centre of scores of reports of slavery and human trafficking, with migrants from Myanmar suffering the worst exploitation.

In the face of mounting scrutiny of supply chains, Thailand has strengthened laws to crack down on labour exploitation, while other countries have passed legislation to address abuses abroad.

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Britain’s 2015 Modern Slavery Bill requires businesses to disclose actions taken to ensure their supply chains are free of slave labour.

In February, U.S. President Barack Obama signed the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act, banning imports of goods made with forced labour into the United States.

Yet at the lowest rungs of supply chains, rights groups say many businesses such as Thammakaset fall short of global standards – even if owners like Chanchai defend working practices.

He said staff voluntarily worked nights to rack up bonuses.

“We paid them to work during the day, but we didn’t forbid them from working at night,” he said, adding that they chose to sleep in hammocks in the room next to the chicken warehouse.

“They play on the Wi-Fi, then go and look at their chickens. They don’t have to work, but they just might think that if they raise the chickens well, they will get more money.”

Flipping through a bound file of documents, Chanchai showed photos of the workers drinking at a restaurant and swimming, and of the low fence around his farm that he said proved they were free to come and go as they pleased.

He said he deducted $2 from their $8.60 legal minimum daily wage for rent, drinking water and electricity, and made cuts such as a 14 cent fine for not picking up dead chickens.

With the fines collected, he would buy a gold necklace for a raffle at the workers’ year-end party, he said.

Hall, the rights activist, said the workers were told if they did not work overnight, they would face salary deductions – a charge Chanchai denies.

Commenting on the 14 cent deduction for not picking up dead chickens, Hall said: “That is illegal. Any deduction from the salary is illegal. He has acknowledged that he has unlawfully deducted money from them.”

Hall added that it was common for employers and officials to rationalise violations, revealing a mindset in which only the most extreme conditions or acts – such as putting workers in chains – constituted crimes.

“These people just don’t understand that what they’re doing is abuse,” he said. “They don’t think of it as forced labour or modern-day slavery. They don’t understand how people could level such allegations against them.”

By Alisa Tang – Reuters


Aadditional reporting by Patpicha Tanakasempipat, editing by Timothy Large.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation, is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and climate change.

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Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

Google

Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.

According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.

Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.

google

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.

Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.

Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.

To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.

Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.

On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.

In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.

Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

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Pixa Bay

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.

TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.

When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.

And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.

Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.

A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.

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Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.

But today, it feels more like reality.

Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.

Could we remember Google in the same way that we remember Yahoo or Ask Jeeves in decades? These next few years could be significant.

SOURCE | CNN

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2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

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Washington — Trump Media,  The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not hear an appeal from social media platform X about a search warrant acquired by prosecutors in the election meddling case against former President Donald Trump.

The justices did not explain their rationale, and there were no recorded dissents.

The firm, which was known as Twitter before being purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, claims a nondisclosure order that prevented it from informing Trump about the warrant obtained by special counsel Jack Smith’s team violated its First Amendment rights.

The business also claims Trump should have had an opportunity to exercise executive privilege. If not reined in, the government may employ similar tactics to intercept additional privileged communications, their lawyers contended.

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Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

Two neutral electronic privacy groups also joined in, urging the high court to hear the case on First Amendment grounds.

Prosecutors, however, claim that the corporation never shown that Trump utilized the account for official purposes, therefore executive privilege is not a problem. A lower court also determined that informing Trump could have compromised the current probe.

trump

Trump utilized his Twitter account in the weeks preceding up to his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to spread false assertions about the election, which prosecutors claim were intended to create doubt in the democratic process.

The indictment describes how Trump used his Twitter account to encourage his followers to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification, and falsely claiming that the Capitol crowd, which battered police officers and destroyed glass, was peaceful.

musk trump

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

That case is now moving forward following the Supreme Court’s verdict in July, which granted Trump full immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.

The warrant arrived at Twitter amid quick changes implemented by Musk, who bought the company in 2022 and has since cut off most of its workforce, including those dedicated to combating disinformation and hate speech.

He also welcomed back a vast list of previously banned users, including Trump, and endorsed him for the 2024 presidential election.

SOURCE | AP

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The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

Supreme Court

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.

The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.

Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.

This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.

In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.

The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.

This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.

The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.

In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.

According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.

Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.

The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.

For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.

Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.

As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.

As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.

The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.

SOURCE: AP

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Scientists Awarded MicroRNA The Nobel Prize in Medicine.

US Inflation will Comfort a Fed Focused on Labor Markets.

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