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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawThailand Immigration LawCan Thai Labor Quotas Impact Work Permits for Permanent Residents?

Can Thai Labor Quotas Impact Work Permits for Permanent Residents?

Transcript of the above video:

As the title to this video suggests we are going to be discussing Thai work permits with respect to Permanent Residents in the specific context of some recent developments with respect to the Labor Ministry placing certain quotas on Thai to foreign labour ratios.

So what are we talking about here? There are two other videos on this channel where we specifically go into recent developments with respect to foreign labour quotas here in Thailand. Suffice it to say that basically the Thais are effectively by policy, capping out the number of foreigners who will be allowed to be employed within a given endeavor at 20% compared to the overall population of workers that are undertaking said endeavor. So a company will probably be the most likely structure you will be seeing that under but it is possible you could see things like Limited Partnerships employing a number of people and these foreign labour quotas are still going to apply.

So 20%, you are allowed to have 20% foreign workers as the ratio allowed in any endeavor so in most classic, especially small businesses set up over here, where you have got a B visa and a Thai work permit, 4:1 ratio has always had to be maintained in order to continuously get work permits and business visas renewed, specifically business visa extensions.

So what are we talking about here? If you have 1 foreigner, you need to have 4 Thais. If you count the total number of laborers or the total number of employees within that structure, you have got 5, 1 of whom is a foreigner 4 of whom are Thai. That meets your 20% requirement because 1 out of 5 is 20%

But here is the interesting thing and this is going to be where I bring up the Permanent Residence issue.   Permanent Residents have some different rules with respect to things like the registered capital necessary in order to support a work permit on a given company as well as the number of workers, the number of Thai workers that have to be employed by that company and basically, somebody who has PR in the Kingdom, there is no 4:1 ratio; in fact there is no ratio. As I go into in another video on this channel, there is a specific ratio for O visas for those who are married to Thai and I will go into that in detail on another video on this channel and I urge those who are married to a Thai and present in the Kingdom on an O visa to check out that video specifically but with specific respect to Permanent Residents there was never any ratio required  s0 you could have no Thai employees if you were permanent resident and still manage to get work permit and a visa wasn’t really an issue. Now that we have these labor regulations, where they are creating this 20% cap, a Permanent Resident in Thailand is not a citizen of Thailand. They remain a foreign national; they are simply a foreign national with a work permit, (I shouldn’t say work permit, excuse me, I misspoke) they are simply a foreign national with Permanent Residence and in the past they had these special rules with respect to the ratio of employees that allowed Permanent Residents to not have to deal with the 4:1 ratio. The implementation of this 20% cap, that could result in permanent residents having to deal with this 4:1 ratio in much the same way that Thai B visa holders have to deal with the 4:1 ratio  with respect to their work permit and visa extensions. We are going to, hopefully we are going to get some more clarification on this in the coming days and weeks and as soon as we do we will try to put up a video as soon as possible to sort of provide an update with respect to this specific issue.