By Anannya Bhattacharjee
May 5 — India, is the second largest producer of tea in
the world. The plantations began in colonial times when they used to
be run inhumanely with workers working and living in bonded labor like
conditions. After the independence of India from the British, a comprehensive
labor code for the plantation workers under the Plantation Labor Act
was passed by the Indian parliament in 1951.
As a result, tea garden workers are more organized and have the right
to collective bargaining. The industry has been dominated by a few monopolizing
multinational companies -- such as Unilever (Brooke Bond/Lipton), Cadbury
Schweppes, Tatas and Associated British Foods — who have made their
fortunes in these plantations.
Over 1.5 million workers work in India’s tea industry, traditionally
one of India’s most important and profitable industries. Yet tea
gardens are facing closures and lockouts around the country. Why are
India’s tea plantation workers in so much trouble when tea continues
to reign supreme among consumers across the world?
Today, tea plantation owners give a litany of woes which have become
familiar and ominous to the labor movement across the world — profit
margins have dropped, competition from Sri Lanka and Kenya is stiff,
cost of production is too high and so on. What follows: arbitrary pressure
on productivity; reduction in wages; elimination of benefits; closures;
lock outs; and de-unionization.
The mantra is “cut the cost of production,” and invest the
huge profits not in compensating labor but in the marketing end of the
industry, in creating and promoting a profusion of brand names, the
logic being that the retail end is where the profits lie.
Price pressures
Vaskar Nandy, who has been organizing in North Bengal for a few decades
and has built independent unions of tea garden workers, says, “The
ordinary tea drinker in India would not know that tea prices have crashed.
Over the period of the crash from 1999 to 2002, retail prices rose by
3 percent, and the trend continues till date. This clearly shows that
demand is not stagnating or declining.”
The mystery behind the dramatic fall in prices, even as retail prices
go up, lies in India’s auction system — where tea is bought
and sold — which dates back to colonial times. According to Nandy,
“The auction organizers and the auction houses are very few in
number and there are only a handful of very powerful formerly British-owned
houses that call all the tunes.
The powerful lobbies controlling tea have long denied what many people
knew about the tea auctions, i.e., they are run less than transparently,
thereby hiding price fixing, black money deals and big player control.
The book value of an auction sale often bears very little resemblance
to the actual value.” Price fixing allows tea to be sold at a pittance
at the auctions so that huge profits can be realized at the retail end.
Ashim Roy, of the New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI, an initiative in
India aiming to build a federation of independent trade unions) believes
that in order to avoid plantation labor laws and regulations, the companies
shut down these plantations, separate out the production steps that
would normally take place within a plantation-from the growing of tea
leaves to its processing and packaging-into several intermediate steps
outside the plantation system.
The companies want small growers that employ contract labor to pluck
the leaves, which then get sold to factories that process them, and
so on, till the retail end. At each step, value gets added and in order
for the highest profit margin, the difference in cost between the first
step and the last must also be the highest. Therefore, the multinationals
want to reduce the cost of labor to a bare pittance and destroy unionization.
Workers abandoned
The West Bengal Network on the Right to Food and Work, a human rights
organization, reports that “deaths due to starvation in the plantations
... with the average number of deaths per year increasing by 241 percent
after closure of the plantations.... families that were consuming 1,200
to 2,900 calories per person per day before closure were now surviving
on as little as 200 calories per person per day. ...a level of consumption
of 850 calories per day is considered the minimum for survival. Case
studies of families of some children who had died recently revealed
that monthly incomes for these families were as low as 50 Rupees ($1.20)
per capita.”
The managers typically begin reneging on wage payments, benefits and
other amenities for some months before actually abandoning the plantations.
They may strip the plantations of their assets, misappropriate massive
funds, before literally running off overnight. Such closures amount
to illegal lock-outs as the workers get no notice.
The health support system on the plantations collapse and with no transport
facilities in these isolated and closed plantations, workers and their
families are literally stranded. In one plantation that I have visited,
people who were surely dying, were simply taken to the hospital only
to die -- the building itself has nothing in it except the dying waiting
to die. Once the managers leave, all infrastructure maintained by them
simply turns off - such as drinking water, sanitation, and electricity.
Children stop going to school -- either schools have closed or the families
are unable to afford them.
Due to the isolated surroundings of the plantations, the workers who
have worked there for generations find no other work. They cannot get
food elsewhere other than the food rations that the employers would
give them. The one demand they have is “Open the gardens, we want
to work.”
West Bengal is ruled by the Left Front government led by the Communist
Part of India (Marxist) -- it is the only state in India in which the
Communist Party has been in power since mid 1970s. Since India began
the so-called New Economic Policies in the 1990s as part of its move
into the global economy dictated by neo-liberal policies, the State
Government of West Bengal, after mouthing protests, has gradually fallen
in line.
The CPI(M) is now aggressively pursuing multinational capital and World
Bank funding, and does not want to send wrong signals to incoming capital
about “labor unrest.”
Trade unions in India are primarily connected to political parties which
limit their political independence. In the case of tea gardens, the
unions connected to the CPI(M) on the plantations are ruled by their
political ties and have not mounted significant resistance.
Due to the isolated surroundings of the plantations, the workers who
have worked there for generations find no other work. They cannot get
food elsewhere other than the food rations that the employers would
give them. The one demand they have is “Open the gardens, we want
to work.”
Local union organizers advocate the formation of workers’ cooperatives.
Workers believe that they can save themselves and the gardens and are
willing to invest their labor and resources in doing so. The government
has, so far, shown no interest in doing so.
Anannya Bhattacharjee is currently based in India and was involved in
the organizing of the World Social Forum IV in Mumbai, India in 2004.
Source: Labornotes
