On July 6, 2021, Advisory Board Member to the Ministry of Labour, Mr. Manas Kosol, and the Chairman of the Social Security Network for Working People spoke about the case where the Kaw Klai Party’s Facebook page published a clip of Mr. Pita Limcharoenkul, the leader of the Kaw Klai Party, speaking at the council meeting on July 1. In his speech, he alludes to the Ministry of Labour and that the Labour Minister must be changed because the social security money was used for the wrong purpose in remedies. In this regard, the Chairman of the Federation of Labour Development Organization in Thailand, and Chairman of the Social Security Network for Working People, see that the Ministry of Labour’s Social Security Office’s work, under the Labour Minister Mr. Suchart Chomklin, is aligned with the legal direction of using the funds, especially to heal the workforce from force majeure, as a result of COVID-19. He said that if people are not in the social security system or not insured, different people will say different things, causing insured persons to become confused. Regarding the term unemployment fund from force majeure, the Social Security Act B.E. 2558 No.4 was recently amended. Originally, if there were force majeure events, fires, floods, contributions would be reduced nationwide. When the Social Security Act was updated, the current law was amended from the 4th edition of 2015, adding Section 79/1 in case of force majeure from unpreventable causes, to be issued as a ministerial regulation, whereby unemployment compensation is unemployment assistance where the ministerial regulations remain at 50 percent of wages.
Mr. Manas said that at present, the Social Security Fund has seven benefits, namely sickness, unemployment, maternity, child allowance, disability, old age, and death. The case of unemployment is divided into 3 cases. The first case is if the employee resigns from work, the employee will receive 45 percent of wages for up to 90 days. The second case is termination without cause, where the employee receives 70 percent of the wages for 200 days. The third case is unemployment due to force majeure, where the employee will receive 50 percent of the wages for 90 days. The Opposition M.P.s in accusing the government of misusing social security payments confuses the people. The funds used to heal the people are separate from insured persons’ contributions because the fund will clearly divide the parts. As for the fund paid to insured persons under Section 33 of the “Section 33 We Love Each Other”, on both payments, the money was from the government, not the Social Security Fund. Over 9 million insured people benefited from the program.
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Division of Public Relations
7 July 2021
