Author: Debdulal Saha
Labour Process in Global Value Chain: Unfolding Labour Questions of Indian Tea Industry
India is the world’s largest tea producer. Tea is primarily grown in large plantations that cover several hundred hectares each. These are situated in mainly four states in the country, namely, Assam and West Bengal in Eastern India and Kerala and Tamil Nadu in Southern India. Assam is the largest tea growing area and it produces 50% of the country’s tea. West Bengal comes next with 17% of the tea produced. The two southern states collectively produce 22% of the tea while the remaining 3% is produced in other states such as Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal in north India. Tea plantations employ labour that usually resides within the plantation. The Plantation Labour Act (PLA) makes it mandatory for the plantation management to provide houses for the workers. This industry is in the formal sector and it employs a little over 1 million permanent workers making it the largest employer in the formal private sector. There have been efforts since mid-1980s to increase production to 1 billion but somehow this could not be achieved. However, during the past five years or so, tea production has suddenly shot up to 1.1 billion. Since the beginning of this century the tea growing areas witnessed a new phenomenon, that of small tea growers. Most sources believe that the proliferation of small tea growers is mainly responsible for the increase in production.
Small tea growers are those farmers who have less than 10.12 hectares of land for growing tea leaves. Small growers do not have this advantage of processing their tea leaves hence they have to depend on larges plantations or on private tea factories that are set up specially to procure tea leaves from the growers. These factories are known as Bought Leaf Factories (BLFs) as they do not have their own plantations and they buy leaves from the growers. A large number of these growers are peasant cultivators, in the sense that they cultivate their own land using family labour while there are others who employ wage labour to work on their land. Processed tea, manufactured in the estates or local factories are sent to the auction centres. The large tea marketing companies buy from there. Therefore, it is evident that tea producers both large estate and small tea growers contribute to the global production network.
The tea industry is an ideal example of a place where social relations of production are well defined and workers in the industry form distinct working class segmented by race, caste, class and even gender. In response to the shift of tea production from traditional large tea estate to more economical viable smaller units, structural changes are taking place in employment relations and even in the labour process. While large tea estates appoint large number of temporary workers, self-employment and wage workers within independent tea growers are seen which was never before in the sector. Large tea estate is characterised by formal relations between owners and management of tea estate and workers, the later, being covered by the PLA and other legal regulations. But the current transition in the mode and system of production have witnessed employment of largely informal labour, casual and family labour who are totally unprotected in the labour market. As a result, the nature of work has undergone changes in forms of deskilling of workers. Whereas work in the factory were performed by skilled indigenous workers being monitored by a level of supervisors, currently work is largely performed by untrained tea leaf pluckers which results in as a serious problem as that of quality diminution. The present empirical study based on large scale primary data will critically examine the changing nature of work control, subordination, recruitment system, employment and labour relations under labour process in the Indian tea industry.