Guest contributor
James Shwe
Many young Myanmar workers in Thailand are running from two things at once: a collapsing economy and a military that wants to put a rifle in their hands.
After the junta activated its conscription law in February 2024, young people fled the country in large numbers, and the regime barred conscription-age men from applying for overseas work permits.
The generals who drove them out now treat them as a source of hard currency.
On October 30, the Financial Action Task Force gave those workers an important statement to point to.
It kept Myanmar on its blacklist with enhanced due diligence, “and not countermeasures,” warned that it will consider countermeasures if there is no further progress by February 2027, and repeated that remittances must be “neither disrupted nor discouraged.”
It also said it is monitoring whether Myanmar will “apply undue scrutiny to legitimate financial flows.”
The money workers send to their families is a legitimate financial flow. The regime’s remittance rules are exactly the kind of undue scrutiny the FATF says it is watching for.
The squeeze
The regime badly needs foreign currency. Foreign direct investment came to just $83 million USD in 2025, while worker remittances reached $5.6 billion USD, about 38 per cent of Myanmar’s foreign inflows.
Workers must send at least 25 per cent of their earnings through regime-regulated banks and pay a two per cent tax on foreign income.
Families receive the money at a worker remittance rate of 3,985 MMK per dollar, compared to about 4,600–4,700 MMK, on the informal market.
By my estimate, that gap in last year’s remittances moved roughly $800 million USD from families to the regime, nearly ten times what foreign investors put into Myanmar in 2025.
The squeeze is tightest in Thailand, home to nearly 2.94 million Myanmar workers with valid work permission.
Since October 14, regime officials at Certificate of Identity (CI) centres have required applicants to prove they have sent home 6,000 THB through official channels and paid the 2 per cent tax.
The transfer slip must be in the worker’s own name. The regime’s labour minister, Maung Myint, told parliament that workers should think of remittances as “a donation” to the country.
With fees, the tax, a visa and broker charges, a worker pays at least 10,000 THB, more than a month’s wage, just to stay legal.
Thai migrant rights groups warn that more than one million workers could fall out of the formal system.
Going home is no escape. Returning workers are made to sign a pledge to serve in the military if summoned, and more than 300 have been blocked from returning to jobs abroad for not complying with the remittance rules.
Thailand is moving
Thailand has its own reasons to rethink this system, and it does not need to take sides in Myanmar’s war to do so.
On October 21, Thai journalist Nathaphob Sungkate said he was surrounded, searched and photographed by men claiming to represent Myanmar’s military junta at the Samut Prakan centre.
Thai People’s Party MP Sahassawat Khumkong has said the centres raise questions of Thai sovereignty, and on October 23 Myanmar workers asked the House labour committee to rely on Thailand’s own pink card.
Thai employers warn of an acute labour shortage, and Thailand has done this before: it closed seven CI offices in July 2024.
Bangkok is already taking a helpful step. Thailand’s Department of Employment says the government and the junta have agreed in principle to waive the 30-day return home for 92,740 workers finishing four-year contracts in 2026 and 2027, if their employers want to keep them.
That would spare them a trip home and the conscription pledge that awaits them there.
The plan still needs approval from Thailand’s migrant-worker policy committee and its cabinet, and workers will still need valid passports, which the regime controls.
Thailand also plans to recruit 10,000 Sri Lankan workers from early 2027, with other countries on its list. Myanmar’s workers should not be made so costly to employ that Thailand looks elsewhere.
Coercion is not needed
The Philippines received $39.6 billion USD in personal remittances in 2025 without forcing anyone.
Manila learned this the hard way. In 1982, Ferdinand Marcos’s Executive Order 857 required overseas Filipinos to remit as much as 70 to 80 per cent of their earnings and tied passport renewal to compliance.
After protests by migrant workers, the punitive provisions were repealed in 1985. The International Labour Organization’s Committee of Experts has called compulsory remittance policies contrary to “the spirit, if not the letter,” of Convention 97.
What can be done before February?
Workers are already organizing. On October 18 they campaigned to work legally on the pink card, without the junta’s CI, and a workers’ committee launched a petition with the same demand.
The labour movement has a mandate to help. In June 2025, the International Labour Conference invoked Article 33 against Myanmar’s military, only the third time in ILO history, asking governments, employers and unions to stop the “free flow of funds to the military authorities.”
Filipino migrant groups, which fought EO 857 themselves, are natural allies, as are Mexican communities, whose lobbying helped cut a proposed US remittance tax from 3.5 percent to 1 percent.
Citizens in the United States, Australia, Canada and Europe, including the Myanmar diaspora, can ask their legislators and unions to raise the CI system with Bangkok and to tell their FATF delegations what workers face.
In Washington, Congress and organized labour remain the more realistic levers. The UN Forum on Business and Human Rights in Geneva, November 23 to 25, is another place to put the CI centres on the record.
The National Unity Government’s Ministry of Labour is already in this fight. It has warned recruitment agencies of blacklisting and prosecution, dissolved an agency association that enforced the junta’s remittance rules, and runs a confidential complaints channel.
Those complaints, with identities protected, can become a verified record of undue scrutiny to share with FATF members before February.
The Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union, which has met the Thai and Philippine foreign ministers, can offer Bangkok a practical partner on worker protection.
Filipino workers once defeated a dictator’s forced-remittance decree. The FATF has now said that the money workers send home must be protected. With Thailand, unions, citizens and their own leaders behind them, Myanmar’s workers can make that promise real.
James H. Shwe is an independent policy analyst and writer on Myanmar and Southeast Asian affairs based in California.
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