ARI Working Paper Series

In 1992 the Bangkok automobile taxi business was ‘liberalized’ and the long-running quota system that tightly controlled the number of taxis allowed to operate was abolished in favor of an open-supply approach. Within months of the policy change the number of taxis on the streets of the Thai capital skyrocketed, as did demand for taxi drivers. Within a few years, Bangkok went from conditions of artificial taxi shortage to a state of oversupply. As a consequence, drivers, who work as independent contractors and are largely migrants drawn from the rural underclass, have faced growing competition and declining real wages; conditions that have intensified over the past five years of political crisis and economic uncertainty.

In this paper, I draw on research from 2005 and 2012, including archival research, ethnographic observation, interviews and two driver surveys, to examine how the 1992 deregulation of the Bangkok taxi trade, led to the further devolution of already considerable economic risk away from taxi firms and onto the shoulders of individual taxi drivers. I argue that this enhancement of individual risk onto workers can be understood as not just the result of policy shifts and changing market conditions, but also as a consequence of a discursive ‘re-positioning’ of economically and socially disadvantaged male labor through the systematic conflation of the ‘traditional’ Thai value of itsara (freedom, independence) with the construction of new neoliberalized labor subjectivities. Furthermore, I analyze how taxi driving since reform has become an ‘always-available’ occupational option for unemployed and underemployed men, and as such functions as a kind of societal ‘safety-valve’ that helps to reproduce relations of economic marginalization and social inequality in Thailand. I conclude with a consideration of the future of the Bangkok taxi business and the implications for taxi labor.