Child labourers toil in Thai seafood factories

SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand, Apr 25 (Reuters) It is 7.30 in the evening and an excited chatter fills the room as 11-year-old Nampeung and her friends get their work checked before clearing their desks and heading home.

But this is no scene from the end of a school day.

Nampeung is an ethnic Mon girl from military-ruled Myanmar who has been working in a seafood factory in central Thailand for nearly three years.

The desks are the metal tables where she spends six days a week shelling shrimps and her work is measured by the kilogramme.

Of the 200 people working in the barn-like factory during an unannounced visit by Reuters, nearly half appeared to be in their early teens or younger -- clear evidence of child labour in an industry worth 2 billion dollar a year in exports.

Half of Thailand's exported shrimps go to the United States, where they end up on the shelves of retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Costco, according to Poj Aramwattananont, president of the Thai Frozen Foods Association.

Japan and Europe each account for another 20 per cent.

Even though she can only dream of going to school, Nampeung is one of the lucky ones. She makes up to 300 baht (9 dollar) a day -- more than the province's minimum wage -- and sees nothing wrong with children her age working.

''The old people are so slow,'' she said with a broad smile, sitting demurely on the floor of the concrete hut next to the factory, which she shares with her mother, father and three siblings.

SLAVE LABOUR Other factories in the coastal province of Samut Sakhon, 50 km west of Bangkok, where 40 per cent of all Thailand's shrimps are processed, do not have such a contented workforce.

A police raid on a factory called Ranya Paew in September revealed conditions that were little short of mediaeval.

Around 800 men, women and children from deeply impoverished Myanmar -- or Burma, as it used to be known -- were imprisoned in a compound behind 4.5 metre walls topped with razor wire and patrolled by armed guards.

The rescued workers told human rights monitors they had to work 18 hours or more a day and were paid 400 baht a month, out of which they had to buy food -- mainly rancid pork -- from the factory's owner.

Those who asked for a break had a metal rod shoved up their nostrils. Three women who asked to leave were paraded in front of the other workers, stripped naked and had their heads shaved.

One shipment from Ranya Paew a few years ago had ended up in the United States, according to a Western diplomat who has followed the case closely.

The Labour Rights Promotion Network (LPN), a non-governmental organisation that estimates there are 200,000 Myanmar migrant workers in Samut Sakhon -- of whom only 70,000 are registered legally -- says the Ranya Paew case is the worst it has seen.

But it is also, LPN says, just the tip of a human trafficking iceberg of factories fed by cross-border people-smuggling rings and labour brokers that enjoy the complicity, if not active involvement, of provincial police and government officials.

''For many migrants, work in Samut Sakhon is the chance for a better life, but for too many it leads to abuse,'' LPN president Sompong Srakaew said.

''Unscrupulous employers and brokers conspire to ensure migrant workers remain vulnerable to exploitation. This is only possible with the complicity of elements within the law enforcement authorities,'' he said.

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