Female Labour in Tea Plantations: Labour Process and Labour Control

This article looks at the effectiveness of Fairtrade's labour rights commitments through the lens of convention theory. It zooms in on workers involved in the cultivation, harvest, and processing of tea as Fairtrade's single most important plantation product. Based on data generated in 2016 through a mixed methods study on the role of Fairtrade certification for tea plantation workers in India and Sri Lanka, we find a wide gulf between living wages and plantation workers' actual earnings, as well as a separation between Fairtrade's role and trade unions. This "test" of certification standards as a compromise between 'civic' conventions concerned with equality and productivity-oriented "industry" conventions suggests that, in actual certification practice, industrial conventions reign. 1 We thank participants of the Fair Trade International Symposium "Fair Trade and the SDGs: Investigating the Fairness of Sustainable Development," 26-28 June 2018 at the University of Portsmouth, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions to improve this article. All remaining errors are solely ours.

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Female Labour in Tea Plantations: Labour Process and Labour Control

Cited by 3 publications

References 3 publications

Economic Crises and Plantation Labour: Changing Contours of Women’s Work in the Tea Sector

Economic Crises and Plantation Labour: Changing Contours of Women’s Work in the Tea Sector

Harvesting consent: South Asian tea plantation workers’ experience of Fairtrade certification

Testing Fairtrade’s Labour Rights Commitments in South Asian Tea Plantations

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