In September 2015, the BBC revealed appalling conditions on
Assamese tea plantations (which supply, among others, London’s Fortnum and
Mason) – overflowing cesspits, leaking roofs, child labour, pesticide poisoning
and severely malnourished children.
But this was not exactly news. There have been numerous
similar reports over the past decades but little changes.
In 2014, the Guardian
reported on ‘Assam’s modern slaves’, claiming poverty wages were the cause of
plantation workers’ children being trafficked into sexual or domestic slavery. A
report entitled ‘The more things change… Enduring abuses on India’s tea
plantations’ found that, despite being part of a World Bank-funded scheme to
move Assamese plantations partly into worker ownership, they failed to meet the
standards of the World Bank, of certification bodies or of Indian law.
One of the root causes, it concluded, was that the
‘compensation scheme originally developed for the colonial plantations and
their migrant workers – low cash wages, supplemented with housing and social
benefits – has remained unchanged. As in the colonial period, the plantations
function as a parallel governance structure, with little active involvement by
the state, whether in setting wages or in monitoring working and living
conditions.’
Certification bodies introduced hope that change was
possible, but a 2013 report by Oxfam and the Ethical Tea Partnership, found
that workers on fair trade-certified plantations received no higher wages than
on non-certified ones; although it provides other benefits, fair-trade
certification only requires payment of the legal minimum wage. The minimum
wages for tea workers in Assam are ‘just above the World Bank poverty line…’
and only 40 per cent of the Indian average.
Where benefits are provided at all, they are often of
appalling quality. Though trade unions have in the past won important benefits
for workers, including equal pay for women, they seem to struggle to win better
outcomes for workers in the tripartite negotiations ostensibly between government,
employers and workers’ representatives. Protesting plantation workers in
Munnar, Kerala, alleged that their trade unions had been bought out by
management and were closely allied to political parties and therefore did not
represent them at all.
Because local populations were unwilling to take up the
back-breaking, low-paid work being offered in the new tea plantations of the
19th century, today’s workers are mostly descendants of impoverished, tribal or
low-caste people from other areas. In Kerala and Sri Lanka, they were Tamil
indentured or bonded labourers. Sri Lankan companies considered shipping in
African slaves but were deterred by transport costs. Chinese labour was
discounted as being too ‘demanding’.
West Bengal plantations relied on forced labour from Nepal,
where slavery was common. In Assam, conditions were even closer to slavery.
‘The picture was not a pretty one,’ says Alan Macfarlane in Green Gold. ‘Men
and women, newly arrived in a strange country after an appalling journey,
crowded on a boat without sanitation from which dead bodies were heaved
overboard at the rate of 20 a week, now driven like cattle towards a miserable
journey’s end.’
Thus these huge, remote plantations were staffed by a
captive labour force kept powerless by poverty, illiteracy, debt and isolation.
The lucky ones had benign, patriarchal managers. The less fortunate were driven
hard, prevented with violence from leaving, paid a pittance and given the
barest minimum of benefits.
Most plantation workers have lost contact with their
homelands and language, yet have not been integrated into the culture of their
new home. They’re often subject to disenfranchisement, violence and
discrimination by the local population. They know no other skills than those
associated with tea cultivation and have few employment alternatives. So when
plantations go bankrupt – as has happened frequently recently in West Bengal –
they often stay put, even if it means starvation.
In Kerala, the result of a growing tourism market, offering
better paid jobs, is a shrinking labour supply at a time when global tea demand
and prices are falling or stagnant. In September last year, falling profits led
to the annual bonus being halved, triggering a strike by thousands of women
that lasted almost a month, stifling the tourism trade and spreading to other
plantations – including coffee and rubber – across Kerala. The women – who
called themselves Pembilla Orumai (Unity of Women) – were also protesting
against low wages, poor living conditions and unhealthy working conditions.
The government has been forced to open its eyes; Kerala’s
Chief Minister, Oommen Chandy, observed that ‘successive governments failed to
catch the lapses of the management [in observing laws on the humane treatment
of workers]’.
So can this group of women workers do what international
financial institutions, NGOs, trade unions, company corporate social
responsibility programmes, certification bodies and governments have so far
failed to do? To break the system that keeps tea plantation workers poor,
freeing them to enjoy the same rights as other agricultural workers?
As author and anthropologist Margaret Mead once said: ‘Never
doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the
world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’ Let’s hope that she will be
proved right in this case, and that another century won’t pass with the same
atrocities being sustained.
The World Socialist Party (India): 257 Baghajatin ‘E’ Block (East), Kolkata – 700086,
Tel: 2425-0208,
E-mail: wspindia@hotmail.com
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