• Inequality, exploitations, and wage gaps that strip female tea pluckers of agency

Ceylon tea is known as one of the best in the world and tea export is one of the main industries that contribute to the national economy. According to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), tea made $ 1,258 million in 2022, the highest contributor behind textiles and garments, and the largest among agricultural exports.

While the tea industry is very much a part of Sri Lanka’s identity today, its history goes back 200 years, when Tamils were brought from South India by colonial bondage, through indenture – an organised slavery system – to create and develop tea, rubber, coffee, and cocoa cultivation. Tea-growing regions in Sri Lanka are mostly clustered among the mountains of the central massif and southern foothills – nearly 4% of the country’s land is covered in tea plantations, amounting to nearly 203,000 hectares.

Housing

The plantation sector has identical housing patterns known as line rooms, introduced by colonial planters. The line rooms are barrack-type structures with 200 sq. ft. for an entire family, with hardly any ventilation, no privacy for grown-up children, and overcrowding due to larger families with their dependent parents. In the plantation sector, 185,533 families are part of a population of 777,730, which live in 163,580 housing units or line rooms. Most of these line rooms are more than 100 years old, and 70% of them live in dilapidated conditions. The percentage of self-owned houses in the plantation community is estimated to be as low as 10.2%. Nearly 13,000 families do not even have line rooms and live in temporary huts.

Life for the plantation community is one of suffering caused by many burning issues, such as discrimination, minimum wages, labour rights violations, inequality, unemployment, and power-sharing. These cause issues for a common person to live equally with another community and create a huge disparity between them and other communities.

Female workers

Female workers dominate the workforce in plantations. A typical workday stretches from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and includes a lunch break. Depending on their targets, female workers sometimes work from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. without a lunch break, which is six hours of continuous work.

Wage is determined by the collective bargaining agreement of the trade union collective and regional plantation companies, which allocated Rs. 900 per day if they work 18 days a month. However, in the event that the worker has put in less than 18 days a month, their rate drops to Rs. 750. A recent wage hike made the wage an all-inclusive Rs. 1,000, but with a limited number of working days.

Based on the above numbers, a worker can earn Rs. 16,200 a month if they work for 18 days. If they work a total of 25 days, they will earn Rs. 22,500. The inflation rate in Sri Lanka averaged 10.08% from 1986 to 2022, reaching an all-time high of 69.8% in September 2022. CBSL data shows that inflation, based on the Colombo Consumer Price Index, was 54.2% in January. Against such a backdrop, female workers face several challenges when running their families and managing their finances, undergoing a lot of physical and mental stress.

Male workers work from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. but get the same rate of wages as female workers. This is pure gender discrimination and high labour exploitation too. Moreover, work conditions are completely neglected, and there are no basic facilities like washrooms and drinking water provided in the field.

Female workers are often ill-treated in their workplace by their supervisors (“kankanis”) and have to walk miles to their work locations. This may cause many health hazards and occupational safety ends in a big question mark for them, where they work amidst many threats such as animal attacks and inclement weather. Thus, it is clear why they generally have an emaciated appearance, which is likely caused by being overloaded by work and mental/physical stress. 

Economic activities

Women in Sri Lanka have engaged themselves in different economic activities. Among different labour categories, women in the plantation sector are one of the most marginalised and exploited groups of workers in Sri Lanka. Plantation women contribute a lot to their families as income earners and take care of the entire family, making them even more vulnerable to exploitation in terms of strength and labour.

Women working as tea pluckers form the single largest segment of the plantation workforce in Sri Lanka. The smooth operation of factory-based tea processing is heavily dependent on the skillfulness and efficiency of the tea pluckers who bring in the green tea leaf. Female workers are economically far more important than male workers.

Until 1978, however, female labourers were paid 20% less than male labourers. In 1978, the then-Government passed legislation to increase and equalise plantation wages for all labour categories, thus removing the wage anomaly between male and female plantation labour that had existed in the sector since its beginning in the mid-19th Century. The daily wage rate for all workers in 2002 was Rs. 130 for an eight-hour workday (in 2019, it was Rs. 750).

The tea pluckers are also entitled to an “over kilo” payment of Rs. 4 per kilogram during the periods of “flush”. However, male labourers have the opportunity to earn extra cash by taking advantage of the plantation work schedule, where men can do task work that they usually complete within a few hours in the morning although they receive pay for an eight-hour day. They can either find additional employment as a casual wage labourer in plantation horticultural activities or engage in other productive work. This is further explored in Women Workers in the Sri Lanka Plantation Sector: An Historical and Contemporary Analysis (1982) by Rachel Kurian.

Patriarchal systems

Sri Lanka has attracted some attention in terms of a woman’s position in society and politics when compared to other countries of the SAARC region, but plantation women have been neglected and marginalised by development programmes. Plantation women’s work has been undervalued and underestimated. The economic contribution has not been fully recognised.

Plantation women tend to have multiple roles. Women have the double burden of being income earners and caretakers. As a result, they do not have leisure time on a normal working day. Estate women are vulnerable to the oppressive economic and social structures which exist in the system that has continued to make them subordinate for over a century. Women’s subordination is rooted in patriarchy; in the plantation families, decision-making on major issues like the education of children, their employment and marriage and handling of the household authority structure is decided by the husband. Women form the majority among trade union subscribers but not even 1% are in positions at a decision-making level. 

The isolated life led by them on the estate is another issue; most of them do not know a world beyond their estate. The female literacy rate remains lower in the plantation sector than in other sectors and the school dropout rate of females remains high. It has been recorded that only 53% of female children complete primary schooling, 24% attend secondary school, and only 4% complete the GCE Ordinary Level Exams.

According to the official records of plantations, female workers earn relatively higher incomes than men, but evidence suggests that they neither handle nor manage their earnings. To start with, female workers do not collect their wages. Women’s wages are routinely handed over to the males (husbands/fathers) by the management and this practice originated in the mid-19th Century, when the Indian Tamil labour gangs, consisting entirely of families, were brought to the newly opened plantations on the island from southern India.

In 2002, decades after independence from the British, more than 15 years after large privately-owned tea plantations were declared as State corporations, and the 1995/96 privatisation of plantations, female wage earnings continued to be handed over to the males. This effectively carries on historically established norms of gender discrimination. Management personnel confirmed earlier observations that frequent family conflicts arise because men tend to waste the wages of their wives or other females on alcohol and gambling.

Financial independence

When focusing on the financial freedom of female workers, in the view of management, women do have the opportunity to collect their wages, since there is a compulsory work stoppage when wage payments are made. Plantation workers are paid twice a month and although there is a work stoppage on the formal payday, the vast majority of the women tea pluckers simply stay at home and male members of the household collect their wages. It should be noted, however, that there are instances when women collect the men’s wages as well, but such cases are extremely rare.

On the days when a wage advance is paid, only a few plantations stop work, and it may be argued that as a consequence of a long history of males controlling their earnings, the Indian Tamil female tea plantation workers have internalised the belief that they cannot manage money and voluntarily leave the management of their earnings to the males. But this does not appear to be the reality. For instance, women tend to have a small amount of money that they manage to hide in an informal savings system called “seettu”. The participants would take turns in receiving the pooled sum of money each month. That money is not given to the males and the women spend it mainly on the purchase of household goods and in some instances, jewellery.

The way forward

The situation in the plantations remains mostly unchanged since the colonial period, in which it was the males in the family who collected the cash payment and spent it on themselves. Most families, especially females in the household, suffer and have to bear burdens mentally and physically, dealing with huge responsibilities and worries in their lives. They have to earn, prepare meals, look after the family, arrange marriages and dowries for their female children, look after grandchildren, and so on. They tolerate all sorts of harassment from drunken male relatives. As a family, they have a peculiar lifestyle, which is different from that of the surrounding village culture. Culturally and socially, females in Sri Lankan society still behave traditionally.

This condition could be changed only through education and opportunities given to plantation women in all aspects. Due to poverty and the patriarchal mindset, they stop their education process. However, if this practice can be ended, female plantation workers can be empowered to be entrepreneurs, political representatives, and professionals, and this is the only way forward to brighten their future.

(The writer currently serves as a project manager in a labour organisation in Sri Lanka, holds a bachelor’s degree in human resource management and a master’s degree in business management, and is currently reading a master’s degree in gender and women’s studies. The writer is also an alternate member [2022] of the National Labour Advisory Council by the Ministry of Labour)

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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication