Stuck for hours each day in snarling traffic, bus conductors in Thailand’s sprawling capital of Bangkok have found a radical solution to a lack of toilet breaks: adult diapers.
Despite years of brisk economic growth, many of Bangkok’s blue-collar workers find themselves on the sharp end of relentless urbanization and stubborn wealth inequalities.
For many of the people who keep the metropolis of 12 million running, such as trash collectors and taxi drivers, rising wages do not necessarily translate into a better life.
Photo: AFP
With congestion worsening, conductors on the capital’s aging buses spend long days on polluted roads in tropical heat, often with no toilet stops.
When she developed a urinary tract infection, bus driver Watcharee Viriya had little choice but to wear an adult diaper to cope with the many hours away from a restroom.
“It was uncomfortable when I moved, especially when I urinated inside [the diaper],” she said.
She was later diagnosed with uterine cancer and had to undergo surgery.
“The doctor told me that it was because of wearing dirty nappies [diapers] and the substances from them going into the uterus,” Watcharee said.
With only a handful of underground or elevated rail links, many Bangkok residents rely on buses, taxis, tuk-tuks or motorbikes to get around and tax incentives have helped a growing number of people buy cars.
Watcharee is not alone in opting for an extreme answer to a lack of toilet breaks: A recent survey found that 28 percent of female bus conductors in Bangkok had worn diapers on a job that requires them to work up to 16 hours a day.
“We were shocked,” said Jaded Chouwilai, director of the Women and Men Progressive Movement Foundation, which carried out the research. “We also found that many of them suffer urinary tract infections and stones in their bladders. Many of the female bus conductors also have uterus cancer.”
The gulf between Thailand’s working class and its wealthy elite is one factor in a complex political crisis that has seen months of deadly opposition protests on the streets of Bangkok, culminating in a military coup on May 22.
The demonstrators wanted to wipe out the influence of former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who reshaped the country’s political landscape by wooing poor and rural voters with universal healthcare, farming subsidies and microcredit schemes.
The tycoon-turned-politician clashed with a Bangkok-based royalist establishment before he was toppled by the army in 2006. History has now repeated itself with another military takeover ousting a Thaksin-allied government, this time led by his sister, former Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra.
Experts say Thailand has made some progress in reducing the rich-poor gap based on the Gini coefficient, a commonly used measure of income inequality that places the kingdom behind Cambodia and Indonesia, but ahead of Malaysia and the Philippines. On the Gini scale, zero represents perfect equality and 1 total inequality.
Thailand’s figure fell below 0.36 last year, down from about 0.42 a decade earlier, data from the Thailand Development Research Institute showed.
Some of Thailand’s worst jobs, such as working on fishing boats or doing agricultural labor, are done mostly by illegal migrants from neighboring countries such as Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos.
Unlike their more assertive European counterparts, Asian workers rarely strike, and in Thailand, it is illegal for employees of state enterprises to walk off the job.
Despite this, Bangkok’s bus conductors and unionists are starting to demand better working conditions.
“They have to work long hours in the heat and when they are hungry, they cannot eat. When they want to go to the toilet, they cannot,” said Chutima Boonjai, secretary of the Bangkok Mass Transit Authority labor union.
Bus drivers also suffer problems ranging from back pain to hemorrhoids.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a struggle to draw new bus drivers with a starting salary of 300 baht (US$10) a day seemingly not compensating for the challenges of the job.
The advent of smartphones and other technological innovations have made the job even harder, with Chutima saying that the technology enables people to complain “if they’re not happy for any small reason ... but they don’t think about how the workers feel.”
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