Tagged: labour

What a Tea Garden Worker Earns

Three producing countries pay tea labour on three different systems, a daily wage plus quota, a daily wage plus a government top-up, and a straight price per kilo. Here is what each one actually pays, and the one case where a wage rise cost more jobs than it raised.

Assam's Tea Economy

Assam alone grows more tea than any country except China and India itself, over half of India's total, out of three ownership models sharing one valley: private estates, a shrinking state corporation, and small growers who now supply more leaf than either.

Labour in the Tea Gardens

Tea is one of the most labour-intensive crops on earth, and no single system pays for that labour. A resident estate wage paid partly in housing and rations, a smallholder's price per kilogram of leaf, and a hired picker paid by neither company nor law. Where each system came from, what a 1951 law and a 1958 international standard tried to fix, and where the audits still do not reach.