Tagged: wages
The Arithmetic of a Garden Closure
A tea garden does not close on one bad season. It closes when the cost of producing a kilo of tea sits above what the auction will pay for long enough that debt outruns the harvest, and the numbers behind that threshold, from Assam's slow squeeze to Darjeeling's shuttered gates, are public.
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.
Darjeeling's Tea Economy
Darjeeling's tea output has roughly halved in a decade and roughly half its 87 gardens have been reported as financially distressed, while the name itself has become the most heavily registered and most tightly licensed geographical indication in tea.
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.