ILPC 2026

This paper investigates whether and how Fairtrade certification of tea plantations in South Asia has been reconstructed as a tool to align workers’ interests with the estate management’s objective to increase labour productivity.

 

Work intensity on South Asian tea plantations has increased significantly in recent years, aggravating the precarity of some of the most marginalised workers in South Asia. This takes the form of, e.g., an expansion of productivity-based contractual arrangements, higher targets for the tea leaf harvest, pruning and weeding, as well as more restrictive interpretations of workers’ leave entitlements. In the context of tea plantations in Northeast India, Sharma (2016) argues that these processes guarantee maximum effort at low cost for the plantation company, while simultaneously making it difficult for workers to find time for trade union-related activities.

 

Fairtrade certification of tea plantations seeks to address tea plantation workers’ precarity and to empower these workers to negotiate improvements in their labour conditions themselves. In the 1990s, Fairtrade extended its certification from smallholders to plantations. Raynolds (2017) highlights two separate motives of this extension: a civic rationale, that landless rural workers are as deserving of support as peasants, and a market rationale, that many crops are not produced in sufficient quantities by small farmers to satisfy the demand associated with Fairtrade’s expansion into supermarket shelves. Several authors, however, perceive that this move has been associated a shift from a ‘logic of empowerment’ to a ‘logic of control’ (Auld et al. 2015). The latter emphasises the amelioration of environmental and social externalities by establishing strict and enforceable rules rather than addressing the exclusion of marginalised actors in the global economy.

 

We found yet another logic at work in the integration of Fairtrade’s certification system into local regimes of labour control, namely the logic of ‘harvesting consent’. In our mixed methods study of the role of Fairtrade in Indian and Sri Lankan tea plantations, we identified surprising reinterpretations of certification. For instance, both estate management and workers understood certification as a reward for higher quality tea, rather than for decent labour conditions. The resources made available through Fairtrade-certified tea sales were redesigned into incentives for attendance and for increasing the labour pool.

 

With Burawoy (1979, 2012), we interpret these local reconstructions as a way to ‘harvest consent’ in order to align workers’ subjective interests with management’s objective to boost labour productivity. This leads to the paradoxical result that, while Fairtrade set out to foster egalitarian trade relations, this way, certification contributes to tea companies’ competitiveness while aggravating workers’ insecurities - without challenging the unequal power relations that characterise the global tea commodity chain.