Abstract:
During the growth of construction projects in Thailand, the worker shortage problem ordinarily occurs in construction industry. One of the solutions which contractors frequently use for resolving this problem is employing migrant workers. However there are some limitations as migrant worker cannot be assigned to completely replace Thai workers. It also leads to a number of problems and obstacles in construction projects. The objectives of this research are to 1) study the types of employment and analyze the problems in employing migrant workers 2) provide suggestion and solution guidelines for any problem related to the employment of migrant workers. The research begins with reviewing the problems of employing migrant workers from previous researches, and developing the questionnaires used for interview. The interview gathered the opinions of contractors on issues in each problem. The issues categorized into 5 areas are law and regulations, efficiency and skill, communication and operation, safety in workplace, and social & public health. The research is also conducted to determine frequency, severity, and significance of each problem respectively. Then these results are analyzed together with previous researches to suggest the proper solution. The result shows that 10 of 42 issues are identified as they strongly affect the time and cost: 7 issues related to law and regulations, 2 issues related to communication and operation and 1 issue related to efficiency and skill. The 3 issues with highest rank in significance score are state persecution and tribute collection, migration or job changing, and misapprehension due to the different languages consecutively. Legal registration for migrant workers is the proper way to solve the problem. Then the management of cost, time and personnel has to be applied to minimize the impacts from employing the migrant workers in construction projects.