The Thai Social Security Office (SSO) has been asked to compensate hundreds of hotels seeking assistance for their staffs by the Thai Hotel Associations (THA).
Hundreds of hotels are doing its utmost effort as local tourism is now approaching to its full halt nationwide. Hotels are forcibly shutting down its doors and/or scaling back their operations drastically.
The THA sent documents on Friday to the Thai Chamber of Commerce disclosing that hundreds of hotels are seeking assistance from the government in order to aid their employees during the temporary closure of Thai hotels due to the present pandemic crisis.
According to Section 75 of the Labour Protection Act, hotel operators should responsibly cover 75% of its employees’ salaries when closing down their businesses. But when hotel occupancy has sunk, most hoteliers can no longer perform their obligations to the employees. Thus, the THA is in dire requesting for absolute measures to help support the employees and hotel owners.
“The THA asked the government to open a registry for hotels that have to temporarily stop operations because of the ‘force Majeure’ under Section 79-1 of the Social Security Act. If the government authorises this measure, the office only pays 50% of the amount of salaries to their employees for six consecutive months,” says chamber chairman Kalin Sarasin
“This is an urgent issue for the chamber. We’ll submit the request to the centre for the resolution of emergencies, hoping to resolve the issue as soon as possible,” the chairman added.
“Operators in some other provinces will not be facing this dilemma, as there has already been an official order of temporarily closure of hotels in the area. Therefore employees will be covered automatically under Section 79-1 of the Labour Act.”
“I’ve instructed the THA to directly present their documents to the Ministry of Tourism and Sports as well as the Labour Ministry on Monday for further reviews and discussions,” says Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn, Minister of Tourism and Sports.
By Larry Cadiz
Source: Bangkok Post
