Home ›› 23 Aug 2022 ›› Front
The wage of tea garden workers in Bangladesh is the lowest among the neighbouring countries and it’s also nearly five times lower than Kenya, a poverty-prone country in Africa.
A worker in Bangladesh earns Tk 120 daily, which is not even enough to buy a dozen eggs now at the kitchen market. The situation is much better in other countries.
Even in Kenya, a tea garden worker earns Tk 583 daily (converted from local currency), which is 4.85 times higher than what workers in Bangladesh get, according to media reports.
Even amid the worst economic crisis in history and the devaluation of the rupee against the dollar, tea garden workers in Sri Lanka still earn more than the workers in Bangladesh.
According to local media reports, a Sri Lankan tea worker earns Tk 264 daily (converted from local currency) and workers in Nepal earn Tk 324 excluding allowances per day.
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In India, the largest and closest neighbour of Bangladesh, the wage varies from state to state. However, the wages in all the states are still higher than that of Bangladesh.
According to reports by The Hindu and Times of India, Kerala has the highest daily wage — Tk 503 — for tea workers among the Indian states.
Karnataka has the second highest — Tk 449, followed by Tamil Nadu with Tk 406.80, West Bengal with Tk 276, Assam with Tk 251, Tripura with Tk 210, and Bihar with Tk 209.
Meanwhile, a tea garden worker earns Tk 305 in Vietnam, according to an International Labour Organization study published in 2020.
With a Tk 120 pay every day, workers in Bangladesh are struggling to feed their families two times a day. They claim owners have cut their benefits in many ways.
“I have a seven-member family. I am the only one who works. My wife gets to work as a part-timer sometimes. How can we maintain such a large family with Tk 120 daily?” Kartik Nayek, who works at a tea garden in Sreemangal, told The Business Post.
“The garden’s owner has cut our other benefits citing different excuses. We badly need a solution,” he said.
However, the Bangladesh Tea Association (BTA), the representative body of tea estate owners, in a statement on August 17 claimed that tea garden workers get at least Tk 400 per day as wages and other benefits. Many have refuted this claim.
BTA Chairman M Shah Alam told The Business Post: “We are giving a wage which allows us to run the industry and the workers to run their families. We have to depend on tea prices. Moreover, our production costs have gone up. We’re incurring losses and doing everything we can to sustain.”
He also reiterated that a worker now gets Tk 400 daily as wage and other benefits.
He also claimed, “Yield in Kerala is 30 per cent high compared to Bangladesh. Despite that, the garden owners there and in some other areas in India are struggling to do business due to the workers’ high wages. Some gardens have already shut down.”
Experts and labour leaders disagreed with BTA’s claims.
Tea garden owners violate at least eight sections of the labour law and the workers’ daily earnings will be hardly Tk 200 even if all benefits are included, said Philip Gain, director of Society for Environment and Human Development, an organization intensively working on tea workers and tea gardens for years.
In this sub-continent, tea gardens are carrying a colonial legacy. Such a huge number of large gardens do not exist in other countries outside this sub-continent. Smallholder tea farmers are contributing the most in Japan, China, Sri Lanka and other countries. Due to this, tea workers earn more in these countries. Even in Sri Lanka, around 70 per cent of tea is supplied by 3 lakh smallholder farmers, he said.
The industry will face no problem if the daily wage, excluding the benefits, is fixed at Tk 200, he added.
Talking to The Business Post, Bangladesh Tea Workers Union (BTWU) General Secretary Nipen Paul said, “Workers in India get good salaries. Compared to them, we demanded Tk 300 and will not agree to Tk 145 as daily wage.
“The government wants time to resolve the situation. So, we gave them time and have resumed our work at Tk 120 for now. We expect the government will fix Tk 300 as daily wage within 15 days.”
“However, many workers have refused to return to work at different tea gardens. Maybe they didn’t understand what we are trying to do. We are not agreeing to Tk 120 or Tk 145. We are only working for Tk 120 until the government fixes Tk 300 as daily wage in 15 days,” he said.
Bangladesh currently has around 1.40 lakh tea garden workers. Of them, 1 lakh are said to be members of BTWU, the only labour union in the tea sector.
According to the Bangladesh Tea board, 96.50 million kg of tea was produced in 2021. A decade ago, in 2011, the amount was 59.13 million kg.
The country also exported 0.68 million kg tea, worth Tk 18.057 crore, in 2021.
There are 167 tea estates and tea gardens in Bangladesh, covering 279,506.88 acres of land. Of them, 129 are tea estates and 38 are recognised as tea gardens.
There are 76 estates in Moulvibazar, 22 in Habiganj, 18 in Chattogram, 12 in Sylhet and one in Rangamati. On the other hand, there are 15 gardens in Moulvibazar, seven in Sylhet, eight in Panchagarh, three each in Chattogram and Habiganj, and one each in Rangamati and Thakurgaon.
