Transcript of the above video:

This is one of those videos I am making to kind of clear up some misconceptions that I oftentimes will hear or see in the Expat Community or sort of the nomad community, the tourist community, whatever you want to call it, here in Thailand. And that misconception is that work authorization issues or lack of work authorization and people that get into trouble for violation of Thailand's Work Permit rules which for those who don't understand foreign nationals in Thailand do not have a right to work in Thailand. In order to work in Thailand you have to be granted explicit work authorization, specifically a Thai Work Permit as we have discussed in many other videos. But there is this kind of misnomer analytical crux if you will, sort of analytical “rule of thumb”, that a lot of folks in the expat community in my opinion, sort of operate off of which is you can't take a job from a Thai, or it's all about whether or not you are taking a job from a Thai. That's not the analysis, and it can lead to some really bad conclusions, and let me get into why. 

Again, the issue comes down to the fact that Thailand zealously guards her sovereignty and zealously guards her labour pool, basically her labour market here in Thailand. And this goes back hundreds of years now. This has been zealously guarded going into the attempts at colonization against Thailand, even in the Cold War era. Thailand has always maintained strict control over work authorization internally. The issue is foreigners are not allowed to inherently work; that's what it comes down to. It's not this notion of "well are you taking a job from a Thai". And I bring this up because a lot of foreigners operate off the presumption that "oh, Thais don't care, Labour Department doesn't care, or Immigration doesn't care so long as I am not taking a job from a Thai. That's not the analysis and this leads to foreigners getting into problems because they think “well you know I am doing XYZ; that a Thai can't do that.” Oftentimes that's a big misnomer too. It's almost kind of holdover from Colonialist thinking that these folks out here can't do the things that we do somehow inherently, which is nonsensical to begin with. 

But again it fails to see the crux of the issue which is, Thais retain the ability to work in their own country in an unfettered manner, and foreigners do not, and they are going to protect that. Now in the past, most countries did this. Unfortunately, in the past 20 years or so, especially in the West, we have seen an erosion of that notion because we have seen an erosion of basic notions of national sovereignty. Not going to get into that at length in this video, but the point I am trying to make is this misconception that it all boils down to, "oh am I taking a job from a Thai" that is problematic and it is problematic is because folks base their own analysis on what they can and can't do with respect to work authorization in Thailand by saying to themselves, "well I'm not taking a job from a Thai, therefore nobody is going to bother me about that." I don't know how many folks I have talked to that are in real problems in terms of work authorization even in deportation proceedings, that I have heard over the years, "well I don't know what the problem is, I'm not taking a job from a Thai." That was never the basis of the analysis, and by basing one's analysis on that misnomer, you can lead yourself into a lot of problems here in the Kingdom of Thailand.