The Problem of Defining Menstrual Pain Leave as Specified by Law

Abstract

Presently, Thai labor has the tendency to hire more Thai employees for work due to several reasons such as the salary earned by the male individual can no longer take care of the family due to the inflation in the economy, females are pursuing higher education
and delaying in getting married and have to work etc. However, due to being a female, there are physical limitations such as menstrual cramps. Such menstrual pain occurs to most of the women and could be really sever that such female employees have to request for a leave every month. Often, the female employee takes sick leave resulting in lesser sick leaves left for other general reasons than male employees or employees who do not have menstrual cramps as they would have to use sick leave, that is given equally to all the employees. This is the origination of the idea to include menstrual pain leave specifically in the law for female employees being separated from sick leaves. However, such concept may cause contradictions in various ways such as firstly to provide evidences; taking leaves for menstrual cramps might require evidences to be submitted to the employer but if compared to the criteria of general sick leave, if the employee takes sick leave for more than three days only then evidence is required to be submitted. Whereas, the menstrual pain for some female employees may be for only 1–2 days. The second issue is equality for utilizing leaves. Requesting leaves due to menstrual cramps is only for female. This may be seen as providing additional rights to the female employees more than the male employees despite many campaigns being raised for gender equality. The third issue is that this may cause the employer to hire lesser female employees as female employees will have more limitation wen compared to male employees. Thus, in order to add more type of leaves in the labor laws, it must be constituted carefully and comprehensively in order to eliminate conflicts that might arise more in the labor society.