SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia Vol. 27, No. 2 (2012), pp. 260–84 DOI: 10.1355/sj27-2c © 2012 ISEAS ISSN 0217-9520 print / ISSN 1793-2858 electronic Cross-ethnic Labour Solidarities among Myanmar Workers in Thailand Stephen CAMPBELL With a prominent focus on military conflicts in Myanmar, international media coverage has tended to emphasize the divisiveness of ethnicity in the country. This article, by contrast, looks at interpersonal ties and formations of solidarity amongst an ethnically and religiously diverse body of workers from Myanmar, now residing in Thailand. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with Myanmar workers, the central argument of this article is that shared socio-economic grievances have served as salient bases of cohesion and collective action within this multi-ethnic, multi-religious migrant labour context. Keywords: Myanmar workers, Thailand, migrant labour, ethnicity, class Delivering his inaugural address to Myanmar’s new parliament in March 2011, President U Thein Sein decried the “racism” fuelling decades of armed conflict in the country. These conflicts — involving the Burman-majority state military and a host of non-Burman ethnic opposition groups — have, he pointed out, brought a “hell of untold miseries” upon the people of Myanmar. These are conflicts that have received extensive academic and journalistic coverage (Smith 1999; Lintner 1999; South 2008; Kramer 2009). Yet, by focusing primarily on ethnic armed opposition movements, such coverage has inevitably given prominence to the divisiveness of ethnicity in Myanmar. Taking an alternative conceptual approach, a handful of scholars have remained critical of analyses that overemphasize the salience of ethnicity in day-to-day social relations amongst Myanmar’s population