| « Previous | Home | Next » | tea pickers2 20 July, 2006 |
 photo: david lindley now i don’t actually know for sure how payment is made nowadays to the plantation workers, but there has been a lot of controversy in the past about virtual slave labour techniques being used. for instance, the workers both lived and worked in villages on the plantation and the owners would pay them with their own currency, which was only redeemable at the village store – coincidentally operated by the same plantation owners! of course this meant that the worker could never earn any real money to enable them to leave their employer; they could be born into and die in the same few acres of land and possibly never even see real money! i understand this practice is now illegal, but still pickers are known to earn so little that they’d be hard pressed to ever afford to buy their own house or start their own business and to escape the clutches of the owner. if you look in the background here you can see that they are weighing the bundles of tea, and this led me to speculate whether they were formed into teams and paid by the weight of their harvest, or perhaps whether – like every aspect of indian life – they just love making records of everything! | |
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Posted by suelindley Archived under: india, people |
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