Home » Awareness Happy New year, may you pay your staff more than $1/hour in 2019? AwarenessUgly Happy New year, may you pay your staff more than $1/hour in 2019? 1

Pattaya is having a qualified staff crisis. Mostly due to the big company’s greed who are not acknowledging the situation.

Your Deluxe burger does not have tomatoes? Your steak is burn while you asked medium rare? You cannot eat because there is no one in the kitchen? You wait 30 min to get your soup?

All the restaurants and hotels are suffering a lack of qualified personals. Big companies like McDonald, KFC, MK etc… are looking for staff all the time, but they are nowhere to find. They are training their staff, but the people do not stay. Wages are too low, they are asked to work too many hours.

They have no choice than asking to the employees from Bangkok to come for help, otherwise, they will have to close the restaurant!

But what is the real situation on the ground? Thai people are exploited, they are working for $1/ hour and if they want to make enough to pay the expensive rent, and food in Pattaya, they have to work OT (extra hours) that are usually paid more than $1/hour (do not dream, $2/ hour is the maximum).

Because there are not enough qualified staff in the kitchens, for example, the current staff are forced to work 16 hours/day, with no break, and eat in the restaurant. If you go at 2am in Terminal 21, you will see some exhausted staff still working. And at 8am, they are back to work because of this staff crisis, they do not have enough people to rotate the staff in the day, so one person has to work for 2 people hours.

So what happen to the qualified staff? They are gone back in another province, to their family or they stop working in the big franchises, because it is not worth it. Making $1/hour ask you to work 60+ hours per week, and have no holiday. The only way to have a day off is to be sick.

People are doing it until they break. And then they go somewhere else.

Pattaya is making money, big companies are making as much as +100k baht per day! But the staff are still paid $1/hour and asked to work 16h a day in these time of holidays!

You can see the bosses of these restaurant driving their Mercedes, their BMW, their Ducati, and spending in luxury stuff, the wife fully restored in the expensive botox clinics.

But they are not ready to pay their staff more. They are sucking the company’s money and exploit the people as much as they can. No yellow protest like in France in Thailand. The people have been exploited for centuries, and they do not go protest unless they are paid for doing it.

Pattaya is making a lot of money, but the only ones who really enjoy are the owner of the companies, the employees are paid the same in Pattaya than in Rayong.

When will be the breaking point where restaurants will have to close because there will be no one to work? And when the greedy bosses will understand that qualified people are worth more than $1 /hour?

All the following pictures have been taken at 2am at Terminal 21, 3 hours after the shops are closing. Enjoy an happy new year, but do not forget these people who are working while you are drinking your champagne: no firework for them.