Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, it is kind of an odd video in a way, we are talking about O and O-A Retirement Visas in the context of Work Permits. This is one of those situations where I was reading something and I realized it could be kind of an interesting, I hesitate to call it a teaching point but I guess that's really the only word for it, to analogize two things that don't look very similar but they have some similarities if you kind of look a little deeper. With respect to the O and O-A Retirement Visa, for those who are unaware, there are differences between those, we will get into that in a minute. For those who are unaware, Retirement Visas do not confer work authorization. Work Permits which are usually issued on either Business Visas or Marriage Visas here in Thailand unless there is a Specialty Visa issued out there with work authorization attached, Work Permits are not generally associated with Retirement Visas which is why this video may seem odd but hopefully as I get into the analysis, folks will see why I'm doing this, kind of created an analogy so people can understand both things better. 

The reason I thought of making this video is I was reading a recent article in the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Pattaya's Labour problems can only be solved by Myanmar recruitment. Quoting directly: "According to City Hall, there are at least ongoing 40 projects in Pattaya and adjoining areas which inquire a foreign labour input. These include public and private sector building enterprises, road repairs and reclamation developments as well as jobs in factories, hotels and food. There is also a totally separate category of expats, many from Europe, however found mostly in teaching and senior management and come under different Work Permit rules and tax regulations from neighbouring economic migrants."

So what are we talking about here? It is this, and I quote "separate category of expats." It is not really all that separate in a sense.  Every foreigner is viewed as such under Thai Law with respect to needing work authorization; only Thais can work in Thailand without work authorization. Now there has been sort of a division, I call it kind of a division of labour within Thai Immigration and the work authorization authorities where they have sort of said look we have got folks from Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, sometimes Vietnam, sometimes to an extent Malaysia but really the main ones you really see a lot of is Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and we have got a lot of folks coming in from these countries as migrant labour, that are oftentimes working, oftentimes you see them in things like construction and things like this. They have a different division of labour as I call it and as such they fall under kind of a different regulatory scheme. So it not unlike the way that O-A Retirement Visas and O Retirement Visas, they are both Retirement Visas; they fall under the same overarching thematic legal umbrella within an Immigration context but they are two different things. As we have noted in other videos, O-A Retirement Visas require insurance for example; that insurance requirement seems to be said to go up here in the fourth quarter of 2022 whereas O retirees do not need insurance, that is something we have discussed in other videos. That is just one example, there are some other differences sort of in application and how you deal with getting each of those different types of Visas but at the end of the day they are both Visas issued to people who want to retire in Thailand, for retirement. 

What we are talking about with Work Permits is sort of the difference between so-called migrant labour and then another type of migrant labour which is sort of the whiter world as they say - expats, farangs - there has always kind of been this and I have done videos on this in the past. There seems to be a weird, it is kind of an odd thing where foreign nationals that come to a place like Southeast Asia call themselves Expats but folks that would go to say the United States or Canada or the UK are called Immigrants. I have always viewed myself as an Immigrant to Thailand. In a sense, as I have discussed in another video, my first year here I kind of considered myself an expat then at a certain point I said "hey I am what I am, I am an immigrant, I immigrated to Thailand." In any event, there is kind of a difference in terminology there. But back to what we were saying, there is this kind of this, if you want to call it two tiered, it is just bifurcated, this differentiation between again the migrant labour that comes from the land border surrounding countries surrounding Thailand here versus folks that come in from abroad, say United States or Europe or something. They come in, get a standard Work Permit, maintain Work Permit status here in Thailand. Yeah there is kind of a different division of labour. Now they do both fall under the same overarching laws. Now there may be regulatory differences in how you deal with it for example a migrant worker from Myanmar versus somebody who comes in from say Germany and wants to be work authorized here in Thailand. Yeah practically it is not going to operate the same and I know it is a semantic point but you have got to remember things like the Emergency Decree regarding migrant labour which happened back in 2019, which we discussed pretty well at length at the time, it had fundamental changes on Work Permits for everyone. That had changes on Work Permit policy with respect to things like location of work, job description; that had ramifications which kind of transcended all the different foreign sort of work divisions of labour within the Thai bureaucracy. That impacted everybody that was a foreign national working in Thailand. So again, they are different. There is a kind of a differentiation between migrant labour versus Work Permits but in much the same way that yes there is a difference between O-A retirees and O retirees, it is kind of a matter of degree. It is not a substantive difference in the sense that they are fundamentally a different thing, they just operate under a slightly different regulatory scheme.