Nothing To Lose But Exploitation
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“I particularly look from the Marx feminist perspectives,” says Ma Cheria, a researcher from Myanmar now living in exile in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Her work centers on women migrant laborers from Myanmar who occupy the lowest tiers of Thailand’s informal economy. Through her research and organizing, she studies how capitalism and patriarchy converge to exploit them, drawing from Marxist feminist theory to expose the mechanisms that tie economic inequality to gendered subordination.
Before the 2021 military coup, Cheria worked as a social worker for nonprofit organizations in Myanmar that focused on peacebuilding and gender equality. She participated in the early waves of the nationwide strikes that erupted after the generals seized power. When arrests spread through the networks of township strike committees in 2022 and several of her comrades were detained, she decided to flee. The choice was at once personal and strategic: she believed she could contribute more effectively to the anti-military struggle by working from Thailand, where she could conduct research and connect with exiled unions and women’s groups.
Once safely across the border, Cheria enrolled in a master’s program in public policy and began documenting the growing diaspora of displaced Burmese workers. Her data mirror her lived observation: as of late 2024, roughly 5.1 million people from Myanmar were in Thailand, of whom about 1.8 million were undocumented. Migration, she explains, did not begin with the coup. This trend was the cumulative result of decades of civil war, natural disasters such as Cyclone Nargis, and chronic poverty. But the coup intensified the challenges. As Myanmar collapsed under repression and conscription, more families fled, and Thailand’s economy—already dependent on cheap migrant labor—absorbed them into its most precarious sectors.
Cheria describes Thailand’s labor market through the local moniker, “3D” jobs: dirty, dangerous, and demeaning. These are the tasks that Thai citizens reject—gutting fish on factory boats, stitching garments in windowless rooms, scrubbing restaurant kitchens for wages that barely cover rent. “It is obvious that Thailand relies on migrants’ labor,” she says, “but the work they have to do is very dangerous.” Her fieldwork in border provinces such as Mae Sot and Ranong shows that reforms in the fishing industry have not eliminated coercion. Workers live for months at sea, their documents confiscated, their pay withheld. Even those with legal papers face bonded labor conditions. Employers tell them, “If you don’t like it, you can go back to your country,” knowing that return could well mean conscription, arrest or worse.
In factories on land, registered workplaces are legally required to pay Thailand’s minimum wage of about 352 baht per day, and to maintain basic safety standards. Yet to get this work, official documentation is needed, work hours are set by the employer and children are not allowed on site. Informal (home-based factories), which are unregistered, escape these obligations. Many women prefer informal sector jobs because it allows them to bring their children along, documentation is not needed, and they can work more flexible hours.; the trade-off is that informal workplaces typically pay half the legally required amount, keep no medical supplies on hand and ignore injuries. Cheria calls this system a form of “structured coercion.” She says, “Workers know it is very unfair, but they cannot complain because they are undocumented.” Complaints to police or labor officials risk deportation.
Her research traces these injustices back to the migration system itself. Although a bilateral memorandum of understanding between Myanmar and Thailand was signed two decades ago to regulate labor flow, the legal process remains so bureaucratic and expensive that most migrants rely on private brokers. Those intermediaries promise passage and jobs but often extort additional fees, seize passports, or sell migrants into exploitative employment. Kinship networks sometimes offer safer alternatives, yet the broker economy thrives on worker desperation and ignorance of official procedures.
Cheria links today’s exile economy to Myanmar’s suppressed labor movement. Under the semi-civilian government of the 2010s, the 2011 Labor Organization Law had legalized trade unions, leading to a surge of strikes, particularly in the garment sector. Women made up most of that workforce and were known for militant action. After the coup, the junta outlawed more than 60 unions, arrested organizers, and drove others underground. Many fled to Thailand, where they found themselves once again unprotected. Thai law allows migrants to join unions founded by Thai citizens but forbids them to form their own, an arrangement that has little meaning in border towns where almost no Thai workers are present. Even when they are victims of wage theft or harassment, most women remain silent; undocumented status turns every act of resistance into a potential risk.
The center of Cheria’s intellectual work is through a Marxist feminist prism; this is a framework that exposes how capitalism and patriarchy reinforce one another. Drawing on social-reproduction theory, she examines how women’s unpaid, domestic labor sustains the paid economy by maintaining workers’ bodies and emotions. “Capitalism not only exploits labor in the production sphere but also in the social-reproduction sphere,” she says. In the factories she studies, husbands and wives may labor side by side, but when they return home, the women continue a second shift of cooking, cleaning, and childcare while the men rest. This unacknowledged work, she argues, is naturalized as “duty” in patriarchal culture.
Cheria explains that capitalism and patriarchy are not parallel systems but intertwined ones, and that “in the revolution, we have to abolish both systems together.” To dismantle capitalism without addressing gender would reproduce the same subordination, just under new rulers; to challenge patriarchy without addressing economic hierarchy would leave women trapped in class oppression. Her critique extends to the militarization of Myanmar’s patriarchy—the way authoritarian masculinity reproduces itself through violence and control. She notes that while feminist ideas have gained currency among urban youth and online activists, practical change lags far behind. Even within resistance movements, gender-based violence persists, and leadership remains male-dominated.
Cheria’s political practice turns theory into pedagogy. From Chiang Mai, she conducts workshops for ethnic women’s organizations inside Myanmar and along the border. They are virtual meetings because travel to conflict areas is impossible. “We cannot teach feminism; we have to reflect our lived experience,” she tells her participants. The sessions are structured around discussion rather than lecture. Participants read short essays from Burmese feminist media platforms such as Revolution at Point Zero and The Poem, which publish testimonies from women in refugee camps and conflict zones. Together they relate those stories to theoretical ideas—liberal, radical, intersectional, and Marxist feminisms—and to queer perspectives on identity and care. Sometimes she invites other organizers to speak so that the learning process remains collective. The impact, she says, is gradual: consciousness grows through dialogue, not decree.
Her fieldwork also exposes the daily realities that theory alone cannot fix. In both formal and informal factories, women face sexual harassment from employers, translators, and male colleagues. Police and immigration officers exploit their undocumented status to demand bribes or sexual favors. Because they fear deportation, victims rarely lodge formal complaints. Instead, they turn to Burmese-run labor organizations in towns such as Mae Sot, where community mediators negotiate settlements. Yet, she says, many Burmese women also do not recognize all abuse as abuse: beating by a husband is often accepted as “normal.” She sees this internalized violence as another legacy of patriarchal conditioning, one that requires education as much as legal reform.
Too add to this grim situation, far-right Thai groups have grown increasingly hostile, accusing migrants of stealing jobs and straining public resources. Raids on Burmese-run organizations have become more frequent, threatening the fragile safety nets the community has built for itself. But in spite of all the challenges, Cheria records quiet forms of resilience. Families pool money to open small Burmese-language schools so their children can learn despite being barred from Thai public education. Volunteer medics operate clinics such as Mae Tao Hospital to treat migrants who cannot afford state healthcare.
In July 2025, Cheria turned her attention to events inside Myanmar, where the arrest of labor leader Daw Moe Aye and eight members of the Solidarity Trade Union of Myanmar (STUM) illustrated the risks facing feminist unionists. STUM, founded in 2016, arose in response to the patriarchal culture of mainstream unions, where men dominated decision-making even though women composed the vast majority of garment workers. STUM insists on gender equality within labor activism. Its leaders continued to organize after the coup, helping workers negotiate disputes despite STUM being declared illegal. Their courage, Cheria explains, came at great cost: arrests, imprisonment, and medical neglect. One leader suffers from diabetes but is denied medication in custody. The persecution of these women confirms her thesis that the struggle for labor rights and the struggle for gender liberation are inseparable.
For her, the repression of STUM members is not only political but also structural. It exposes how authoritarian power, capitalist interest, and patriarchal hierarchy sustain one another. Cheria rejects the idea that labor activism is apolitical; by confronting both the military regime and the business class that profits from it, unionists are waging a political battle in its purest sense. The movement’s endurance, she argues, depends on international attention and pressure. Foreign banks and corporations that contract Myanmar factories can be forced to respect workers’ rights when they fear global scrutiny.
As the interview draws to a close, Cheria returns to the question of solidarity. Her appeal is directed first to ordinary Thai citizens, urging them to recognize their dependence on migrant labor and to support collective organizing. But she also calls for global alliances grounded in class consciousness rather than charity. “It is very important to show solidarity with the working class from Myanmar,” she says. True internationalism, in her view, means understanding that exploitation crosses borders—that the hands sewing garments in Mae Sot are part of the same system that profits from cheap labor everywhere.
Cheria has seen comrades imprisoned and communities scattered. Yet her resolve remains firm: enacting the belief that feminist Marxism offers not only critique but also a method for building equitable social relations. The revolution she envisions is not confined to the fall of the junta; it extends to the transformation of everyday life—how work is valued, how care is shared, how equality is practiced.
Her closing thought is both personal and political. She imagines a region where solidarity replaces hierarchy, where labor is dignified and women are free from double exploitation. The same theoretical clarity that shapes her research becomes a moral conviction: that liberation cannot be partial, and justice cannot exclude those whose hands keep the world running. “When we create and sustain the economy,” she says, “only a small group benefits, while the majority—the working class—remains unseen. That is why solidarity matters.”