Siliguri: “Twenty, or there shall be no festival,” yelled Rajani Bhushal, a 64-year-old tea worker from Darjeeling’s Longview tea estate.
She was one of the loudest demonstrators outside Shramik Bhawan, the north Bengal zonal office of the state government’s labour department in Siliguri. Inside, a tripartite meeting was on to decide the rate of bonus for the tea workers of West Bengal for the 2023-24 financial year.
Bhushal is among hundreds of tea workers from various tea estates in the Darjeeling hills who have been campaigning for more than a month for a bonus at 20% of their annual earnings. “We are not begging,” she said. “We are asking for our rights.”
Darjeeling tea is made from the finest leaves and it takes the finesse of women pluckers like Bhushal to pick two leaves and a bud by hand while balancing heavy wicker baskets strapped to their foreheads and resting on their backs. In the treacherous terrain of the eastern Himalayas, the job is arduous.
The women make Rs 250 a day. The tea workers of West Bengal are still not covered by the Minimum Wages Act, which has been a longstanding demand of trade unions. The irony is that workers contributing to the production of the world’s priciest teas earn among the poorest of wages, a sad legacy of the colonial era.
The much-awaited bonus comes once a year, ahead of Dusshera – the biggest festival in the hills. And it never comes without a fight.
Darjeeling tea workers at a sit-in demonstration in demand for a 20% bonus at the labour commissionerate in Siliguri on October 1. Photo: Anuradha Sharma.
The bargaining
Bonuses for tea workers in West Bengal are decided through collective bargaining. Instead of individual companies settling with their employees, negotiations are held between managements and trade unions at the industry level. For the Darjeeling hills, this involves 87 tea estates and around 1 lakh workers. The state government is called in to arbitrate when bipartite talks fall through.
This year, eight trade unions linked to different political parties joined forces at the bargaining table under the banner of the Tea Workers’ Protection Committee and raised the demand for a 20% bonus, one percent higher than last year’s. This is also the highest permissible rate under the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965.
“This year, the workers received no increments. Also, due to the fall in production, workers could not make the extra money, or bakhshish, they generally make for plucking tea leaves over and above their targets,” senior trade union leader Saman Pathak explained.
“Our appeal to the management was to compensate workers in their time of need. In the days to come, like always, the workers will stand by the owners and help increase production,” Pathak said.
When formal bipartite talks began on September 2, the owners’ body offered an 8.33% bonus, the minimum rate according to the Bonus Act.
“The low rates we offered reflect the dire straits the industry is in. Costs have increased manifold; international demand is shrinking; production has gone down steadily (6 million kg currently, compared to 8 million kg about five years ago). We are losing in competition to Nepal tea. At least a dozen tea gardens have shut down,” said a member of the Darjeeling Tea Association (DTA), on condition of anonymity, fearing backlash in the “politically charged atmosphere” of Darjeeling.
From September 13, tea workers began organising ‘gate meetings’ at various estates to press for their demand. “From September 16, we stopped the dispatch of made tea from the gardens,” said Pathak.
Workers at the Ringtong tea estate at a gate meeting in demand for their pending dues, including provident fund and gratuity, in July. Photo: Hill Plantation Employees Union.
The management then sought government intervention. “It is the labourers who should be approaching the labour commission for help,” said Pathak. “Strangely, it was the owners who rushed to the government.” The DTA member said that they sought out the government “to settle the matter amicably, since the trade unions showed no signs of budging from their position”.
Four tripartite meetings were held at the office of the additional labour commissioner in Siliguri between September 20 and 29, during which the owners raised their offer to 13% in many stages. The trade unions stuck to their demand for 20%. After the fourth meeting ended on an inconclusive note, the trade unions called for a general strike the day after.
On September 30, the Darjeeling hills came to a standstill in response to the 12-hour bandh call. Late at night, trade union leaders received letters from the government asking them to join a meeting at Shramik Bhawan the next day.
Bhushal came to know of the development on the morning of the meeting. She and more than fifty other workers from Longview rushed to Shramik Bhawan in trucks to extend their support to the trade union leaders. It was the day before Navaratri began, and the women were giving it their last push.
“Twenty, or nothing,” they chanted outside Shramik Bhawan on October 1, unaware that by then the West Bengal government had already issued an advisory directing tea planters to pay bonuses at 16%. The news was already all over the media, but they heard it from the trade union leaders when they walked out of the meeting in protest.
Bhushal and her co-workers burst into tears.
Trucks stranded near Darjeeling in response to the 12-hour strike called by the Tea Workers Protection Committee on September 30. Photo: Anuradha Sharma.
Emotive issue
On October 2, the Darjeeling Workers Protection Committee took out a massive rally in the heart of the hill town to protest the “surreptitious way” in which the bonus was sealed at 16%. Demonstrations and roadblocks by tea workers were supported by the general population.
In a video released by the Hill Plantation Workers Union on October 3, workers at the Margaret’s Hope tea estate announced that they would refuse to join work until they got bonuses at 20%.
“The government announcing an advisory in favour of the management, that too by releasing the news to the media first while we were still at the negotiating table, seems like a deliberate act of coercion,” said Pathak. “There is a clear management-government nexus. An elected government must stand up for the common people, in this case the tea workers who are asking for their basic rights.”
The DTA member who spoke to The Wire said the planters would “honour their commitment to the government advisory” even though 16% was “higher than what we can afford”. “Matters concerning bonuses are labour issues, but in Darjeeling, [the] bonus has become a political issue,” he rued.
The tea industry is an integral part of the hills, woven deeply into the region’s history, culture and economy, as well as its politics. For generations, tea cultivation has shaped the lives of the local people.
Young members of the cultural wing of the Hill Plantation Employees Union (HPEU) lend their support to agitating tea workers. Photo: HPEU.
Ever since the violent Gorkhaland agitation of the eighties, in which more than 2,000 people were killed, the region has seen periodic unrest over the demand for a separate state for Nepali-speaking Indians, who identify themselves as Gorkhas or Gorkhalis.
In 2017, a general strike lasted for 104 days. It crippled normal life, but received massive support from the people of the hills, for whom a separate state and the resolution of their identity crisis remain an emotive issue.
“The issue of tea workers is as important to us as Gorkhaland,” said Ajay Edwards, president of Darjeeling’s Hamro Party, during his interaction with the media outside Shramik Bhawan on October 1.
“There is a high chance of the workers’ movement taking on a much bigger shape and causing unrest in the hills. It can happen any time, and if it does, no one will be able to control it. So, the government must not ignore the plight of the workers.”
The bonus negotiations of the tea industry are hotly contested and all political parties try to gain mileage out of it, but this year the issue is resonating beyond political circles. “This is not only the defeat of our workers, it is our loss too,” Siliguri-based journalist Babita Maden wrote in a Facebook post, reflecting the widespread empathy and outrage that echoed throughout the hill community.
Blood tea
After all the demonstrations, strikes, meetings, rallies and sloganeering, the maximum amount a tea worker can hope to get, even if bonuses are calculated at 20%, will not be more than Rs 15,600, Pathak told The Wire.
Bhushal was expecting to get about Rs 10,000-12,000 while she clung to the hopes of a 20% bonus. “My children and grandchildren will come home for the festivals, and I have no money,” she said. “The payment at our estate is irregular; I haven’t got paid in the past four months.”
Tea worker Rajani Bhushal at a demonstration at the labour commissionerate in Siliguri on October 1. Photo: Anuradha Sharma.
Four years past her retirement age, Bhushal continues to pluck tea. “They have not processed my retirement yet; neither have they paid me my retirement dues,” she said.
The annual struggle for a bonus is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of problems plaguing the tea workers. “The condition of tea workers in Bengal is worse than sweatshop workers in Bangladesh,” said Edwards. “The plantations present near-slavery conditions for workers.”
Inspired by the global campaign against blood diamonds, Edwards had started the “blood tea” campaign at the time of bonus negotiations two years ago, rattling planters, who even wrote to the chief minister complaining against it.
Edwards has threatened to restart the campaign should the bonus issue not see an amicable settlement.
Ever since the British set up the tea plantations in Darjeeling more than 150 years ago, inexpensive labour has been essential to the prosperity of the industry. And the planters of today are not ready to make any changes.
“Wages constitute 70% of our costs,” said the Darjeeling planter. “In 2011, the wages were Rs 90 per day. Today, it is Rs 250. Tea prices have not risen in the same manner. If we are to pay more to workers, our cost burden will increase. We will lose out to our competitors. We are caught in a vicious cycle.”
Bhushal doesn’t understand all the maths. “We have worked hard to make this industry thrive, we deserve justice,” she said.
