Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the clarification I guess, regarding work restrictions. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Foreigners working without a permit in Thailand face Crackdown. I am going to quote a couple of excerpts. There's some further legal reasoning in there that I am not going to really even get into because it's so nebulous that I think it is almost counterproductive to even get into going into back and forth of "well is this allowed, or is that allowed?" Look, at the end of the day there are, and as we will get into here, let me just go ahead and quote this, hold on. Quoting directly: "Confusion has already risen because of changes in 2018 to the formerly strict alien employment legislation." Quoting further: "Given that Thailand is now welcoming millions more visitors without prior approval, the need for a new and comprehensive employment law is becoming a priority." 

Now as you can see, I paraphrased that. There is further information in that specific paragraph pertaining to this overall issue, and again just to requote: "Confusion has also risen because of changes in 2018." Regarding the changes they are talking about in there, that is from the Emergency Decree of 2018 which did change some of the parameters associated with not only the definition of work in Thailand, but also the parameters of work in Thailand. 

There was a time when there was a very strict interpretation of Work Permit rules wherein in basically the interpretation was you can only work at the exact address of the company you work for, for example. Some of that was liberalized. Now as we have discussed in other videos, there were those that went out and then said "oh no Work Permits required anymore in Thailand!" That's nonsense. As we discussed, certain things like shareholder meetings in Thailand, directors meetings in Thailand, may not require a Work Permit to attend. That said, the parts of this I didn't quote are talking about a lot of nebulous stuff that I don't think it's a great idea to just detrimentally rely on the fact that "oh this was covered by the Emergency Decree." That's, again I think it's too nebulous to try to rely on that because again it is an Emergency Decree; it primarily pertained to migrant labour, generally labour coming over the borders here in Thailand and again while it did relax certain things, it was not overly clear on other things. 

So could further clarification be useful perhaps? I don't think it is actually necessary. I actually think Thai Law is pretty clear on labour restrictions here in Thailand both in terms of the restrictions to go ahead and need to have a Work Permit in order to work in the first place here in Thailand, as well as restricted occupations. But that being said, maybe reasonable people can disagree on that. It remains to be seen if they will publish further clarification regarding working in Thailand but we will certainly keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.