Stuck for hours each day in snarling traffic, bus conductors in Thailand’s sprawling capital of Bangkok have found a radical solution to a lack of toilet breaks: adult diapers.
Despite years of brisk economic growth, many of Bangkok’s blue-collar workers find themselves on the sharp end of relentless urbanization and stubborn wealth inequalities.
For many of the people who keep the metropolis of 12 million running, such as trash collectors and taxi drivers, rising wages do not necessarily translate into a better life.
Photo: AFP
With congestion worsening, conductors on the capital’s aging buses spend long days on polluted roads in tropical heat, often with no toilet stops.
When she developed a urinary tract infection, bus driver Watcharee Viriya had little choice but to wear an adult diaper to cope with the many hours away from a restroom.
“It was uncomfortable when I moved, especially when I urinated inside [the diaper],” she said.
She was later diagnosed with uterine cancer and had to undergo surgery.
“The doctor told me that it was because of wearing dirty nappies [diapers] and the substances from them going into the uterus,” Watcharee said.
With only a handful of underground or elevated rail links, many Bangkok residents rely on buses, taxis, tuk-tuks or motorbikes to get around and tax incentives have helped a growing number of people buy cars.
Watcharee is not alone in opting for an extreme answer to a lack of toilet breaks: A recent survey found that 28 percent of female bus conductors in Bangkok had worn diapers on a job that requires them to work up to 16 hours a day.
“We were shocked,” said Jaded Chouwilai, director of the Women and Men Progressive Movement Foundation, which carried out the research. “We also found that many of them suffer urinary tract infections and stones in their bladders. Many of the female bus conductors also have uterus cancer.”
The gulf between Thailand’s working class and its wealthy elite is one factor in a complex political crisis that has seen months of deadly opposition protests on the streets of Bangkok, culminating in a military coup on May 22.
The demonstrators wanted to wipe out the influence of former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who reshaped the country’s political landscape by wooing poor and rural voters with universal healthcare, farming subsidies and microcredit schemes.
The tycoon-turned-politician clashed with a Bangkok-based royalist establishment before he was toppled by the army in 2006. History has now repeated itself with another military takeover ousting a Thaksin-allied government, this time led by his sister, former Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra.
Experts say Thailand has made some progress in reducing the rich-poor gap based on the Gini coefficient, a commonly used measure of income inequality that places the kingdom behind Cambodia and Indonesia, but ahead of Malaysia and the Philippines. On the Gini scale, zero represents perfect equality and 1 total inequality.
Thailand’s figure fell below 0.36 last year, down from about 0.42 a decade earlier, data from the Thailand Development Research Institute showed.
Some of Thailand’s worst jobs, such as working on fishing boats or doing agricultural labor, are done mostly by illegal migrants from neighboring countries such as Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos.
Unlike their more assertive European counterparts, Asian workers rarely strike, and in Thailand, it is illegal for employees of state enterprises to walk off the job.
Despite this, Bangkok’s bus conductors and unionists are starting to demand better working conditions.
“They have to work long hours in the heat and when they are hungry, they cannot eat. When they want to go to the toilet, they cannot,” said Chutima Boonjai, secretary of the Bangkok Mass Transit Authority labor union.
Bus drivers also suffer problems ranging from back pain to hemorrhoids.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a struggle to draw new bus drivers with a starting salary of 300 baht (US$10) a day seemingly not compensating for the challenges of the job.
The advent of smartphones and other technological innovations have made the job even harder, with Chutima saying that the technology enables people to complain “if they’re not happy for any small reason ... but they don’t think about how the workers feel.”
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency and the Pentagon on Monday said that some North Korean troops have been killed during combat against Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk border region. Those are the first reported casualties since the US and Ukraine announced that North Korea had sent 10,000 to 12,000 troops to Russia to help it in the almost three-year war. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said that about 30 North Korean troops were killed or wounded during a battle with the Ukrainian army at the weekend. The casualties occurred around three villages in Kursk, where Russia has for four months been trying to quash a
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
ROYAL TARGET: After Prince Andrew lost much of his income due to his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, he became vulnerable to foreign agents, an author said British lawmakers failed to act on advice to tighten security laws that could have prevented an alleged Chinese spy from targeting Britain’s Prince Andrew, a former attorney general has said. Dominic Grieve, a former lawmaker who chaired the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) until 2019, said ministers were advised five years ago to introduce laws to criminalize foreign agents, but failed to do so. Similar laws exist in the US and Australia. “We remain without an important weapon in our armory,” Grieve said. “We asked for [this law] in the context of the Russia inquiry report” — which accused the government
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
RSS