Tea Planiation Labour in India chemicals but this has been gathering dust in Parliament for over three years. Lastly, children are supposed to be given lighter work such as removing weeds and undergrowth but this is not always done. Children are often found to be engaged in more strenuous work which is performed by males. Hence even though there are gender specific and age specific categories in the workforce the nature of work is similar. The hierarchy in the work: organisation is fairly elaborate. There are several intermediaries between the manager and the workers, a large section of which belong to the sub-staff, In fact, many of these strata exist only to relay orders from the top and widen the social distance between the management and the workers. The management of plantations is mainly based on fear and maintenance of social distance !)y the management. In this sense, there is an inherent contradiction in the plantation system. Though plantations constitute an industry, the relations which exist between the management and workers have remnants which are pre-industrial. Thereis a stark difference the opulent life style of the management and the frugal between of the workers and the sub-staff. living conditions hierarchy thus, in a way, bridge the gulf between the worker The intermediary layers in the and the manager, Implications of Famil y-bbased Employment WOMEN AND CHILD WORKERS plantations is the large e of child labour. Women a t l w w ay s s remain ag ordinar ¥y workers and are sqpemsory categories (namely, sub-staff), seldom promot promotec fo the N — — e a n -\h:‘-m­e m——— . ­Introduction TABLE 3 Permanent Workers in Tea Plantations(1992) State ­Assam West Bengal Tamil Nadu Kerala India Male 256,249 110,160 40,278 31,804 447,085 Female 249,848 116,387 57,086 38,337 ­470,835 Adolescent 11,041 5,389 195 1,314 18,230 Children 43,537 10,956 79 67 55,554 _ Total 560,675 242,882 97,638 71,522 991,704 In reality the more important reason for the employment of women is because of family based employment in plantations in the earlier stages, As noted earlier, families migrated to the plantations and all members were engaged in work. This tradition has since continued. In fact the planters have now used the widespread employment of women as a means of depressing the wage rates. The Fifteenth Indian Labour Conference held in 1957 decided on the concept of a need-based minimum wage which took into account three units of consumption while determining the wage of 2 worker, The employers organisations in the tea industry protested against this formula by arguing that since employment was family based (that is, every family had atleast two workers) only 1.5 units of consumption should be considered for determining the minimum wages of tea worlters. The Central Wage Board for the Tea Plantation Industry (1966) found this argument baseless and commented.: The family system of employment eannot he considered as unique to the tea plantation industry and even if it had heen so it is a matter of consideration whetit h is jeustr ified for eniployers to claim benefit of it by way of low wages for male wage earnors. ­The planters, however, obstinately stuck to their own concept of wage determination. As a result, tea plantation workers are the lowest paid in the organised sector, We shall deal with this aspect in the section on wages. However, the fact remains that the planters have used the existence of the high employment of women workers to keep wages low. The other aspectis the existence of child labour which is again a result of the earlier practice of family-based employment. For example,