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LIVING THROUGH CRISES
regions with the highest poverty rate, and where agriculture is the dominant economic activity, the focus was on the impacts of the crisis on remittancerecipient rural households and included households with and without land. This distinction was considered important to understand land and agriculture as safety nets. In the coastal area of Samut Sakhon province, FGDs were organized with employed and unemployed Thai workers, legal and illegal Burmese migrant workers, and owners of small and medium enterprises (SME). Ayutthaya province was selected for its importance as a center for automobile and electronics manufacturing, and the sample in this province focused on factory workers in export-oriented sectors from assembly line to managers. Domestic migrant workers make up 70 percent of Ayutthaya’s population. In-depth interviews were carried out in all sites with a variety of informants including business representatives; national, provincial, and municipal officials; journalists; police officers; chamber of commerce and trade union representatives; and staff from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs )and charitable institutions.
Transmission Channels: From Macro Shocks to Impacts on People and Communities When first interviewed in March 2009, company representatives from the auto industry, textiles, information technology (IT), and electronics indicated that the reduction in external demand for their products, coupled with a credit crunch, forced many of them to scale down production and to cut back labor inputs in the form of reduced working hours, no overtime, extended holidays, and in the worst cases, layoffs. A year later, by the first quarter of 2010, the situation had improved in most of the export-oriented manufacturing sectors with some larger companies experiencing renewed external demand for their products. The auto industry, for example, mirrored corporate responses at the global level, and although a few companies stopped production early in 2009, others remained competitive by meeting changing consumer preferences. By 2010, the automakers who had adapted their production were leading the recovery of the sector with small and fuel-efficient cars. The rate of recovery for smaller enterprises was, on the other hand, much slower, and many of the small and medium businesses in the sample continued to have limited access to bank loans and were struggling to survive. The following section recounts the impacts of these macro-level changes on formal and informal workers, rural households, and migrant workers.