COLOMBO: An agitation in Sri Lanka’s tea plantations involving about 225,000 workers of Indian Origin since September 26, is adding to the woes of the island nation’s tea industry which is seeing new lows in production, exports and earnings for a variety of internal and external reasons.
Almost a fourth of Sri Lanka’s one million plantation workforce have been either on a strike or agitation demanding a minimum wage of LKR 1000 per day. But plantation companies are not willing to go beyond LKR 720 per day from the present LKR 620 per day and insist that any wage increase will have to be based on productivity.
The worker’s demand is based on three factors: rising cost of living; non arrival at a Collective Agreement since 2013, and the non-availability of avenues of advancement for workers.
Estate managements do not give facilities for education, skills development and earning an extra income through supplementary occupations like small-scale cultivation of vegetables. The only facility given is housing, but the nature of estate housing has not changed since the 19 th.century.
The managements, on the other hand, want any agreement to be based on productivity and not on attendance, as it has been for the last 150 years. They point out that Sri Lankan estates’ productivity is the lowest among tea producing countries. While it is 1700 tons per year per hectare in Sri Lanka, it is 2000 tons per ha in India and Kenya. The companies blame labor for it. But labor blames the managements for low productivity. Companies have not invested in modernization of equipment and land management. Replanting is also inadequate.
The managements point to fall in production and declining exports for their inability to pay higher wages and blame the government, the international situation and labor for the situation.
In 2016, tea production is likely to fall below 300 million kg, the lowest since 2000. In the first eight months of 2016, earnings dropped to US$ 843 million, lowest since 2007. Exports have suffered due to instability in the Middle Eastern and Russian markets and Sri Lankan tea’s inability to penetrate the European market. The ban on chemicals to destroy weeds, high cost of fertilizers and rising wages are blamed. Labor comes in for particular criticism because it accounts for 70 percent of the total cost of production.
But Labor rejects the companies’ case, saying that they violate ILO conventions. As per an ILO convention, five days’ work should be assured, but only three are. Wages should be pegged to Cost of Living, as they were earlier. But this system was abandoned sometimes ago and substituted by the two-year Collective Agreement, points out Ashraf Aziz, Democratic Workers’ Congress
“But employers are reluctant to enter into a Collective Agreement now unless it is based on productivity,”Aziz said.
Both the workers and the companies are now relying on the government to break the deadlock.