People's Democracy

MNC’S RANSACK AN INDUSTRY

  THE CASE OF TEA

  Suneet Chopra

THAT the Indian tea industry is currently in a doldrums and its workers are facing a major crisis, was the conclusion of a twelve-member fact finding team of leaders from all-India mass organisations and others that visited a number of plantations in Kerala and Tamilnadu from January 21 to 26 this year. The team consisted of Kanai Banerji (CITU), S N Thakur (AITUC), P K Walanj (HMS), P A Joseph (INTUC), Suneet Chopra (AIAWU), Ashim Roy (INTUC), Meena Patel (IUF), M Subbu (TNCWU), Professor Virginius Xaxa (Delhi School of Economics), J John (CEC), Shatadru Chattopadhyay (CEC) and Sindhu Menon (Labour File).

INDEBTEDNESS, STARVATION, SUICIDES

These people were moved to take a team over to the plantations in the said results as a result not only of contradictory reports coming of the impending ruin of the plantation industry in southern India, but also by preliminary reports of the fact finding surveys of the Centre for Education and Communication (New Delhi) that cases of starvation deaths and poverty related suicides were occurring among tea workers in the area.

A particularly disturbing case was of 14 years old Velankanni of Pashumalai estate in Wynad district of Kerala. She killed herself on account of extreme poverty, hunger and the inability to buy a school uniform. A student of class IX with a very good record, she used to walk 8 km daily to the panchayat high school at Vandiperiyar. Her father, Chinnaparaj, was a labourer in Pashumalai tea estate whose management has not paid its workers for months. The family had obviously no money even to eat, leave alone buy uniforms. According to the post-mortem report, there were no signs of food in her intestines. Thus there is no doubt that she had not eaten for a couple of days at least.

That this should happen in an industry that was supposed to benefit from globalisation is a matter of concern. India is the largest producer of brown tea in the world, and also its largest consumer. In 2001, India produced 854 million kg of tea and consumed 673 million kg. It accounted for 31 per cent of the world tea production and has shown a growth of 250 per cent since independence. It has an annual turnover of Rs 10,000 crore and foreign exchange earnings of Rs 1,847 crore a year. This is obviously not the profile of a sick industry.

The fall in tea prices is stated to be the basic cause of the crisis, which has ostensibly forced plantation owners to increase the workload, stop payment, reduce wages, mechanise plucking or even abandon plantations. Our discussions with small farmers in the Coonoor area also brought home to us the fact that while no suicides by farmers have yet been reported, the farmers (who number 2,30,000 at least) are badly in debt, are being forced to sell parts of their holdings for urgent expenses and, as one farmer told us, the only recourse may be suicide in future.

The curious thing about this is the fact that the fall in tea prices is not a global phenomenon. It affects only India and, in India too, South India. The tea prices are on the rise or have not fallen so sharply in Sri Lanka, Kenya and a number of other countries. For example, if the dollar price of Indian tea fell by 18.73 per cent between 1999 and 2000, that of Indonesian tea rose by 13.55 per cent, of Kenyan tea by 13.48 per cent and of Sri Lankan tea by 7.86 per cent. Evidently, something other than just the ups and downs of global market is involved here.

BIG PLAYERS IN THE MARKET

Secondly, while planters claim that the cost of production, and especially the labour cost, is rising, they appear to have no qualms about selling tea below the cost of production --- at auctions that they themselves concede are manipulated by big players in the market, like Hindustan Lever and Tata Tetley. The planters claim that the cost of tea production was Rs 63.08 per kg in 2000. But they allowed the auction prices to fall from Rs 68.79 per kg in 1998, to Rs 57.10 per kg in 1999, Rs 44.64 in 2000, Rs 46.02 per kg in 2001 and Rs 42.19 per kg in 2002. At the same time, the consumer still pays Rs 120 to 180 per kg. Why did they not protest more vociferously?

The answer is obvious. They are not prepared to point a finger at the big corporates and find it easier to make the workers pay to make up for the plunder by corporates and multinationals who control the auctions by unfair practices like cartelisation, by proxy bidding and by dividing lots after bidding as one buyer, to depress the prices. In fact, in a report commissioned by the Tea Board in 2002, international management consultants A F Ferguson and Co also questioned the auction procedure. The report pointed out that, with a nexus between the tea brokers and buyers (with the Hindustan Lever also owning one of the key brokerage firms, Carrit-Moran), such auctions could not be called auctions in the true sense of the word, as they were neither transparent nor fair. Also, the stipulation that a large percentage of the tea produced has to be sold at the auctions, prevents market forces from operating against those monopolising the market to the detriment of both the planters and workers. 

The planters see the crippling of the tea industry at the hands of this nexus as something unavoidable. But, instead of confronting the corporates, they are hoping that the government and the workers would bail them out. And what do they want? They are all for lowering the workers’ wages, increasing the workload, and relaxation of the land reform legislations for pineapple, banana and other agricultural products. In fact, I saw a copy of the book Land Reforms in Tamilnadu on the table of the tea-garden manager at Thirunelveli, who called upon the police to fire on tea-garden labourers. The object of this approach, which is in keeping with the NDA government’s plan to hand over the forest, waste and degraded lands to multinationals and corporates, is to dry up any possibility of giving surplus land to the landless. The poor must be deprived to pay for the insatiable greed of the rich.

MAKING WORKERS PAY FOR CRISIS

Their attitude to workers is even worse. They say the labour cost constitutes some 60 per cent of the cost of production, but the figure is not sustainable. On the contrary, the figures given as wages are inflated beyond belief. This came out in the evidence provided at a two-day workshop held at Valparai in Coimbatotre on April 27 and 28, to which the CITU, AITUC, INTUC, HMS, LPF and ATMS had sent 10 delegates each, with sessions being taken by Shatadru Chattopadhya (CEC), M Subu  (TNCWU) and Suneet Chopra (AIAWU) from the fact finding team. According to this submission, to determine the cost of production, the planters claimed that the workers were getting a daily wage of Rs 134.73 when in fact they were getting only Rs 72 per day, and even this is being treated as an advance.

There are both --- coercive reduction in wages and an increase in workload. The Hindustan Lever Ltd, one of the main culprits in the auction manipulation, has actually tried to show others the way forward as they see it. In the Srikundra estate this company owns in Tamilnadu, the management served a notice to the workers, reducing their wages to Rs 60. At the same time, they increased the quota of hand plucking, from 25 to 27.5 kg per day; 41.5 kg for shear plucking and 110 kg for mechanical harvesting. And if pluckers fail to meet these increased quotas, they are penalised. Deductions from their wages are made at the rate of 28 paise per kilo below the abovementioned minimum output.

What horrible results this kind of approach leads to, came clearly across to us when weeping women workers reported how their arms ached and stomachs hurt by using these machines for plucking. They also told us how, when they complained to the plantation owners and management about these problems, they were advised to have the uterus removed in order to work better! It is strange that while the machines that destroy the workers’ bodies are tolerated, the employers even suggest that the body be operated upon to meet the needs of the machine. Such harmful mechanisation has to be stopped at once. And when they sought to get leave during menstruation, the supervisors shamed women by harassing them sexually: “How do we know you are having periods? Show us and we will believe it.”

Creating such oppressive conditions, tea gardens’ managements are running the whole process illegally. In Peerumade and Vandiperiyar areas of Kerala, employers have locked out or abandoned as many as 14 plantations, while at least two major estates have been abandoned in Gudalur area of Tamilnadu. Many others have defaulted on payments of wages, provident fund, gratuity and bonus. Among these defaulters we have companies like RBT, MMJ, Bonacadu, Peeramade and Mahavir. What is remarkable is that planters seem to fail to appreciate the fact that this increased workload and mechanisation has lowered the quality of tea and led to the loss of the Russian market, that was the mainstay of south Indian tea producers, to Sri Lanka.

To add to it, while workers still live in oppressive enclave conditions on the plantations, they are denied even drinking water, electricity, lavatories and medical facilities. For the managements of many of the estates are resigned to being looted through the auctions, and have taken to looting the workers themselves. In such conditions, neither the human rights provided by the Indian constitution nor the Plantation Labour Act are being implemented.

GOVERNMENTS’ BLINDNESS

What is shocking, however, is that the government of India and the state governments of Kerala and Tamilnadu are still blind to the havoc the plantation owners and the multinationals are creating in the tea industry. They appear to be interested only in siphoning funds from the industry on the one hand and pleasing their World Bank creditors on the other, by allowing the planters and multinationals the freedom to treat the workers as they please.

One of the reasons for this attitude of these governments is that the tea industry is heavily taxed, pays corporate income tax on 40 per cent of its income and agricultural income tax on 60 per cent, of which Tamilnadu takes a little over half annually. The government of India has backed down after announcing some half-hearted measures against the auction regime. After the fact-finding team’s visit, the Tamilnadu government too announced a commission on tea garden labour. But in the same breath the state’s chief minister announced her agreement with the BJP-led central government’s plan to hand over vast areas of land to multinationals who are likely to rule them like colonies, if the experience of the “Banana republics” of central America is anything to go by. The concern for the rights of workers is almost completely absent.

This was noted both by the fact-finding team and the workshop. It was clear that unscrupulous multinationals are siphoning off the bulk of the profit from tea industry. They also own major firms of brokers to manipulate the auctions that neither correspond to international norms of auctions nor are conducted strictly legally. Then, under pressure from these multinationals, the planters, the central government and state governments are not prepared to change their practices and make the big players work according to market rules.

As we know, the US pressured the government of India to begin dismantling the quantitative restrictions on agricultural imports from 1999-2000 when it could have waited till 2003. Not only that, the central government refused to avail of a number of protective mechanisms afforded by the WTO, largely on account of US pressure. Even now, the central government refuses to impose the tariffs that it can to make Indian tea competitive. Worse, it has allowed all kinds of labour saving machines to be imported free of customs duties, without checking out how harmful they can be to those who use them. In the same way, dangerous chemical sprays, many of them banned in the European Union and the USA, are being freely sold and used in India, without the workers being given protective devices like masks, gloves or boots. This is resulting in serious injuries and even deaths, most of which are not compensated for.

WORKERS HAVE TO PROTECT INDUSTRY

It is evident that neither the government at the centre nor those of Tamilnadu and Kerala, nor the planters, are really concerned about the quality of production, safety of the workers and strict implementation of the laws that govern the plantation economy. On the contrary, they are prepared to wink at the extra-legal activities of the multinationals that have ruined the plantation economy in a bid to take it over cheaply, and wish to use its ruins to attack the living standards of workers who are putting in an honest effort daily to keep production going. In these conditions, trade unions are left with no alternative but to unite and fight for the life and livelihood of workers, for the industry’s survival, and for a self-respecting attitude in face of the government of India and planters shamelessly surrendering to the multinationals our commercial interests and our rights as a sovereign nation. 

This leaves the workers as the sole force not only to defend their livelihood but also to ensure the tea industry’s survival. They can only do it as a united and organised force. An important need is to fight to change the auction rules so as to preventing its misuse by multinationals. Workers have to free the tea market from the auction mechanism, and force the corrupt plantation owners to pay them their dues and implement the Plantation Workers Act and other legislations. Workers have also to prevent the diversion of profits from tea plantations to other businesses to avoid paying the workers proper wages and, if necessary, to ensure that all sick and abandoned plantations are taken over by the state or handed over to workers’ cooperatives for running. This requires strong unions with a unified aim of consistent struggle. Recent events indicate this is possible. Already we see the beginnings of this process both in Tamilnadu and Kerala. Hard work we need so as to ensure that it succeeds.