Fair Trade and Women Without History
The Consequences of Transnational Affective Solidarity
When we were young it was the age of unions; now it is the age of NGOs, they are the ones who can bring real reform to these plantations with their new ideas and projects. See how they have involved all these young people from the West to improve our worker’s lives.
These celebratory comments about the effectiveness of NGOs to involve volunteers and visitors from Western countries for plantation reform were made by Mr. Pradhan, the manager of a Fair Trade certified tea plantation—Sonākheti—in Darjeeling district. Mr. Pradhan’s observations validate the increase in voluntourism—a combination of aid-work and tourism. Voluntourism exemplifies cosmopolitan sustainable tourism also reflected in corporate social responsibility and ethical consumption initiatives (Vrasti 2013, 9). As a feminist researcher interested in women’s political lives within Fair Trade certified plantations I was naturally drawn to explore the effects of Fair Trade−related voluntourism on women’s everyday political and work lives. More so since plantation authorities urged me to observe the activities of these volunteers much more than the workings of traditional labor unions that had recently negotiated a wage increase for plantation workers across the board. Some voluntourists I met in Darjeeling contacted me after I returned to the United States to share their class projects, photographs, and on a rare instance an amateur documentary available on YouTube,1 through which I realized how cooperatives were being understood and represented by voluntourists in documentaries and websites. I was also able to see the roots of informal ways of maintaining Fair Trade’s public image, a kind of soft biopolitics, unfold alongside the formal enumeration and documentation of Fair Trade’s effects in official documents.
As I spent more time in Darjeeling’s Fair Trade certified plantations I realized that the popularity of market-based sustainability and social justice initiatives like Fair Trade had engendered new possibilities for consumer citizens in the global North to demonstrate solidarity with producers in the global South. Self-selected Fair Trade voluntourists extended their affective solidarity by visiting certified production sites to participate in and witness the effects of Fair Trade on workers’ livelihoods. Their acts of participating in, witnessing, recollecting, and documenting the effects of Fair Trade in turn produced new kinds of knowledge about plantations while affecting the plantation public sphere. Voluntourism also failed to recognize the inequity of new contract farming arrangements that small producer cooperatives like Sānu Krishak Sansthā had to navigate, sometimes confusing small farms with plantations. In existing studies of Fair Trade, the activities of voluntourists in the global South are unexamined and this chapter will address this important gap in the literature. Everyday Sustainability contributes to this growing body of voluntourism-related research to specifically identify Fair Trade enabled voluntourism and its different forms of community engagement.
The potential these voluntary acts of solidarity and related transnational praxis hold for increasing the bargaining power of producer citizens (plantation workers) vis-à-vis the state becomes salient since in India the state regulates wages and other plantation benefits via the plantation labor act (for details see Besky 2014; Koehler 2015). Fair Trade as an empowering venture must address the issue of bargaining power of producers since wages and benefits are baseline determinants of quality of life for plantation workers. What I witnessed was that Fair Trade−engendered solidarity practices erase the complex history of workers’ struggle with the state and established systems of power through collective bargaining. Fair Trade enthusiasts operate on a limited understanding of the political lives of women plantation workers and women tea farmers. As I argue in this chapter, in Darjeeling’s tea plantations, Fair Trade as transnational praxis has inadvertently pushed justice-seeking and delivery to a non-state sphere that is not accountable to the workers in terms of citizenship rights. Further, this privatization of justice indirectly undermines the possibility of strengthening collective bargaining institutions though Fair Trade and inadvertently decreases the state’s accountability to workers or farmers. This chapter contributes to the new line of enquiry in sustainability research where the place of meaning-making around sustainability practice and its relation to new forms of value creation is central (West 2012; Brown 2013).
In the rest of this chapter I provide ethnographic evidence of the growing disconnect between these new kinds solidarity-based transnational praxis—voluntourism—and its effects on plantation associational life concluding with some theoretical reflections on these affective solidarity practices and their effects. These findings are based on research with Fair Trade enthusiasts visiting Darjeeling district between 2004 and 2011. I conducted participant observation and semi-structured interviews with forty-seven Fair Trade enthusiasts who visited two tea plantations, Sonākheti and Phulbāri, where I conducted most of my research for this chapter. The Fair Trade enthusiasts I observed and interviewed fell into three groups: tea buyers (six), student visitors (thirty-one), and student NGO volunteers (ten). I also interviewed seven student visitors traveling through the Fair Trade−certified cooperative (Sānu Krishak Sansthā) area trying to document Fair Trade projects. One of them interviewed me extensively on her visit and later made a documentary but left out my opinions and the footage she shot with me.2 Since plantations had more structured arrangements hosting voluntourists, it was easier for me contact them and systematically recruit voluntourists there.
Encounters
When these student visitors ask me what my life is like, what I know about Fair Trade and what problems I face, I really don’t know where to begin. To tell you the truth, we have been struggling within this plantation system for so long, why have these visitors come now? What can they change with a project or two, they are the owner’s guests, and we just want them to enjoy their stay; that is our job.
—Prema Rai (female plantation worker hosting students)
I feel so connected to this planation and its workers already. I have been talking to so many people in the Joint Body and see that Fair Trade has made this plantation sustainable. Isn’t that remarkable?
—Hayden Zichne (female student visiting Darjeeling)
The disconnect in expectations around solidarity between student volunteers like Hayden Zichne and their plantation-worker-turned-host like Prema Rai is common in Darjeeling’s Fair Trade−Organic Certified tea plantation sector. As a consumption driven transnational solidarity initiative Fair Trade’s global regulations are designed to promote greater solidarity between Fair Trade commodity producers and their consumers by providing a meaningful transnational field of praxis so that consumers not only enjoy high quality commodities but empower workers in the global South through meaningful activities to witness justice on the ground. These emerging acts of redemptive consumption (Igoe 2013; Vrasti 2013; Brondo 2013; Brown 2013) are accompanied by a progress-reality-check for worker empowerment—typical within the playing field of commodified social justice movements—not without its ironies and contradictions.
The fault lines within the Fair Trade movement gained much attention in the Spring of 2012 when a key North American stakeholder (Paul Rice, now director of Fair Trade USA) disagreed with the functioning and objectives of the international Fair Trade movement resulting in a high-profile rupture in solidarity between regulatory organizations of the Fair Trade movement. In this chapter I offer a different picture of the tenuousness of the solidarity idea and practice by highlighting a trajectory of faultlines that has received much less attention from the Fair Trade practitioners and academics. The present moment is ripe for foregrounding a different face of the solidarity crisis that laces the subjective aspirations of the weakest stakeholders in the Fair Trade chain, the average Western consumer, and Fair Trade’s purported beneficiaries in the margins of a Fair Trade economy.
The Fair Trade movement has enabled “small acts” (Brown 2013) of transnational solidarity building that advance a fetish of what Jim Igoe (2013) identifies as the “redemptive spectacle” of green and socially just capitalism. I argue that these new forms of just-in-time transnational solidarity practices of Fair Trade enthusiasts—consisting of onsite observations of “Fair Trade,” informal witnessing, and reporting of justice in social media—transform and shape the lives of producers in small farmers cooperatives and plantation public life in important ways through this new kind of soft-biopolotics. Operating outside the formal purview of Fair Trade certification (which defines and measures the effectiveness of “Fair Trade” production), the transnational praxis of Fair Trade enthusiasts demarcate the success and/or failure of Fair Trade in ways that are central to legitimacy of Fair Trade in the global morality market. An ethnographic exploration of Fair Trade enthusiasts and their voluntary transnational solidarity projects among beneficiaries of Fair Trade (in this case Darjeeling’s tea plantation workers) demonstrates the centrality of certain forms of justice voluntourism (Brondo 2013, 115) to the workings around Fair Trade.
These “small acts” (Brown 2013) that unfold in postcolonial space and time are central to the movement in many ways: it secures a market, makes the movement real for its consumer participants—Fair Trade enthusiasts/voluntourists—by providing opportunities to volunteer for Fair Trade (see also Goodman 2004; Brondo 2013) to identify and work toward meeting the “needs” of the disenfranchised, and draws consumers into everyday acts of redemptive consumer behavior (Igoe 2013). These visits as acts of solidarity create a particular kind of gendered postcolonial intersubjective space where new truths about the lives of postcolonial women plantation workers in eastern India are written over a palimpsest of colonial forms of labor management and “native” forms of worker organizing strategies developed in response to such practices. The ironies of solidarity tourism enabled by Fair Trade enthusiasts is that it produces partial truths about associational life in postcolonial Fair Trade certified places. These truths circulating in virtual and real space in turn sustain relationships of material and discursive dominance of the North over the South (see also Gajjala 2014).
Sadly, the exercise in defetishization that the Fair Trade movement promises to its supporters and beneficiaries is fraught with contradictions that often render postcolonial plantation workers as “people without history.” These practices knowingly or unknowingly alienate plantation workers from their productive political engagements with the plantation management and also from institutions of collective bargaining and negotiations (via Trade Unions) that emerged within the democratic space of the nation-state. Instead, these rituals of transnational praxis—through “voluntourism”—disproportionally valorize forms of bureaucratic management of justice through Joint Bodies. As new worker-management conglomerates the Joint Bodies are outside the purview of state monitoring and lack any institutionalized transparent means of operation. Fair Trade enthusiasts see the Joint Body as an important node in transnational social justice operations deemphasizing forms of collective bargaining indigenous to specific locales. Thereby, they establish a new set of standards for witnessing, experiencing, and measuring Fair Trade’s success in which the significance of labor unions and workers’ citizenship rights vis-à-vis unions and the state become progressively less relevant.
In describing the nature of these engagements, I take heed from scholars of postcolonial transnational feminism, (Alexander and Mohanty 2013, 971) who remind us that in neoliberal times social inclusion and justice take queer forms:
… [R]adical ideas can in fact become a commodity to be consumed … no longer seen as … connected to emancipatory knowledge … Neoliberal governmentalities discursively construct a public domain denuded of power and histories of oppression, where market rationalities redefine democracy and collective responsibility is collapsed into individual characteristics. … Such normative understandings of the public domain, where only the personal and the individual are recognizable and the political is no longer a contested domain.
My decade-long research in Darjeeling, India, enables me to witness these contradictions and their consequences for the economic and social justice aspirations of average Nepali tea plantation workers and smallholder women farmers who perform the harshest labor in producing “Fair Trade” tea.
In the following sections I set the ethnographic context for this chapter and its findings, followed by detailed data analysis on the everyday life of Fair Trade enthusiasts and their “transnational” Fair Trade practices.
Rituals of Witnessing
My analysis of the Fair Trade enthusiasts’ interviews revealed certain key phrases they used to describe their purpose in visiting Fair Trade–certified plantations. Most frequent reasons cited were “to connect with workers,” “to help in Fair Trade projects,” and sometimes “to learn about workers’ lives,” “understand them,” “show our support for workers.”
The enthusiasts were Europeans and North Americans of diverse backgrounds. The students, who worked as interns in local NGOs, were between eighteen and thirty years old and had some involvement with Fair Trade–related activities or alternative sustainability initiatives in Western countries. The independent tea buyers and NGO volunteers were slightly older, ranging from their late twenties to fifty years of age. Most were consumers of Fair Trade products in their home countries. A few were traveling on their own and spent a week or two on a sustainable farm. Some of them searched online for places where they could participate in Fair Trade initiatives. They were interested in organic agriculture in the global South and came to experience it on plantations, very rarely finding themselves in non-plantation areas like Sānu Krishak Sansthā.
Their first point of entry for Fair Trade was the plantation management. Upon their arrival they were assigned to a “host,” usually a plantation worker placed fairly high in the plantation hierarchy. Between the two plantations there were a total of 769 registered plantation workers and about 45 of them hosted Fair Trade enthusiasts in home stays. These “hosts” were the best paid and well-connected among plantation workers. They usually had good housing infrastructure with proper toilets and had some knowledge of English. The home stays enabled them to earn some extra money since visitors paid for these stays. During my fieldwork I found the expenses at home stays to be Rs. 250 to 400 per night including three meals. A student or NGO volunteer could choose to reside in a home stay or an addition to the plantation owner’s residence complex called the “eco-house” (in Sonākheti) or “visitor’s lodge” (in Phulbāri). The independent tea buyers rarely participated in home stays, usually being housed in the eco-house or visitor’s lodge and meeting plantation workers only when the management would assign them a worker-guide during their field visit. Many visitors would start with home stays then move into the eco-house or visitor’s lodge because they had televisions, modern restrooms with running hot water, and were close to the managers residences and main roads.
These living arrangements spatially limited the interactional possibilities for Fair Trade enthusiasts. They were exposed only to a certain class of plantation workers, usually better off ones, and were inundated with practiced Fair Trade propaganda. The only way they could learn about Fair Trade or participate in actual “Fair Trade” processes was through participating in Joint Body–managed projects. The two plantations I researched had more frequent Joint Body meetings when the concentration of Fair Trade enthusiasts was high. If visitors wanted to interview workers, their hosts picked the interviewees and also served as interpreters. Those enthusiasts who walked about the plantation on their own would always be surprised at how the owner kept tabs on where each visitor went on such excursions. This monitoring was explained as an exercise in safety.
These arrangements framed how Fair Trade enthusiasts experienced the plantation and learned about its people. The typical daily schedule for student visitors and NGO volunteers was to eat breakfast at the home stay, visit the plantation to see workers (typically tea pluckers) in action under the guidance of the “host” worker, then eat lunch with the host family before visiting the tea-processing factory. Visitors would often strike up conversations with the pluckers, asking questions in English about their family and work. The host-interpreter would try to translate the exchanges. The tea pluckers welcomed the visitors with words of appreciation they had been taught by the plantation managers or host, thanking visitors for buying the tea they produced. Workers would never complain about anything and would appear very happy working at the plantation and receiving visitors at their workplace. Usually the groups of workers would stop their work and ongoing conversation to attend to a visitor. The host selected one or two women from the group, who recited their appreciation with a very artificial demeanor. They would also show the Fair Trade enthusiasts how to pluck tea and pose for photographs or videos. The visitors came with books, brochures, or newspaper clippings bearing iconic images of smiling women tea pickers. The plantation office or local NGOs also supplied these.
The hosts appointed by the management played a key role in mediating what visitors would see and with whom they would speak. For example, Fair Trade tea is marketed using images of smiling women with bare, nimble fingers plucking soft budding tea leaves. In reality, pickers usually use gloves because the rough, stalky tea shrubs scrape their hands and make their fingers bleed (see figure 8.1 in chapter 8). This practice of using gloves contravenes a strict management directive to use uncovered fingers. The host would alert the tea-pluckers to present themselves with bare hands in front of the visitor, who is seen as the plantation owner’s guest. Many pluckers would also wear their best clothes and shoes when visitors were expected.
At the tea-processing factory visitors were usually greeted by smiling female workers, who sorted and graded tea leaves, and male managerial office workers. In the factory the visitors tasted tea and observed organic manure being made. The host would also take them to several Fair Trade–related projects, such as biogas production initiatives or schemes to improve the plantation crèche. The visitors played with children in the crèche and often had their photos taken holding them. Such photographs signifying solidarity between producers and consumers were displayed in the management office in the visitor’s lodge to create a welcoming atmosphere for future visitors.
Visitors would spend their evenings on their own or with others like them, or be entertained by their host family. Plantation workers would often organize cultural performances based on Nepali folk songs and dances even though such traditional entertainment was not very popular in the plantation community, especially among the younger generation. Yet the traditional songs and performances were presented to Fair Trade enthusiasts to show how the plantation’s sustainability initiatives also extend to preserving cultural forms.
Fair Trade enthusiasts might also spend the evening having cocktails at the owners’ bungalows, learning about plantation history from the managers or owner. These closely guided visits rarely provided scope for talking to average workers. As a result Fair Trade enthusiasts learned mostly about the formal production process and certain Fair Trade projects and knew very little about the actual circumstances of the workers. Below are brief descriptions of some typical visitors I met and interviewed.
Denis came from the United Kingdom. He was twenty-one and attending college. He visited Sonākheti, where his host was Phulrani, a nurse from the plantation dispensary and member of the Joint Body. Denis stayed in the eco-house and Phulrani met him every morning to escort him around. Denis was very impressed with Phulrani since she took him to the fields and introduced him to other members of the Joint Body. For many Fair Trade enthusiasts, learning about organic agriculture was a way to connect with the local people.
At Phulbāri I met Ellie and Andy. They apparently participated in community farms in rural Pennsylvania and were taking a break from college to travel around Southeast Asia, living in “Fair Trade–certified sustainable communities,” as Ellie explained. They were in Darjeeling for a short visit to learn how Fair Trade supported organic agriculture. Ellie reported she found out about Phulbāri from a local travel agent in Darjeeling, who had then arranged the trip. Ellie and Andy were excited to be able to participate in organic farming by living in farming households. They, too, hoped to “connect with” and “learn from” farmers. Like many other Fair Trade enthusiasts, they did not understand the difference between a plantation worker practicing organics and a farmer.
Visitors were also invited to attend Joint Body meetings, which were posed as sites of critical dialogue and discussion between workers and management. The Joint Body was presented as an organic and democratic partnership between workers and management. In contrast, the trade unions were portrayed as troublemakers—organizations of violent outsiders who disturbed the peace in plantation communities by politicizing simple workers trying to maintain their traditional ways of life. Joint Body meetings were usually convened by a junior manager whom Fair Trade enthusiasts assumed was an average worker (see Kamalā’s discussion later). The worker-representatives were treated respectfully in front of the visitors.
In a typical meeting the manager would begin with a long list of projects being planned or undertaken with the Fair Trade premium. The manager questioned the workers, who usually responded by describing the ways they benefited from these projects. Workers seldom brought up any grievances about the projects or the general condition of the plantation in these meetings. Even though complaints about the Joint Body were very common, workers never discussed them in front of Fair Trade enthusiasts, who were equated with management. There was absolute silence on the issues of wages, overtime work, casualization of workers, water shortages, and inadequate medical facilities that workers would otherwise discuss.
I have described these rituals of solidarity-building to show the framed encounters between the visitors and workers who are the supposed beneficiaries of Fair Trade. The frame constitutes of the ways in which the local host and the management make critical selections about how visitors experience life in a plantation community. These selections form the contours of a reality that the Fair Trade enthusiasts deeply engage with and believe that they can continue to influence by buying Fair Trade tea (see also Moberg and Lyon 2010). I now turn to how recollecting and documenting such experiences helps to maintain the reality created through these framed encounters.
Recollections and Documentation of Witnessing Fair Trade
Fair Trade enthusiasts were kept busy engaging in meetings and myriad projects during their short visits. Only during my interviews with them did I have opportunities to see how they understood the everyday reality of Darjeeling’s plantations and the agency they gave Fair Trade in shaping it. As an interlocutor and interviewer, I came to know about the picture taking shape in the visitors’ minds. They would eventually transmit their views of the plantation community and production locales to sites of consumption through narrating their eyewitness stories and experiences online.
I asked Denis what he found out about the plantation and the effects of Fair Trade from his visit. He replied:
Thanks to Phulrani, I could attend a Joint Body meeting. I know that the children could now access the newly stocked library because of Fair Trade. She told me about organic agriculture. I had heard that plantations are really harsh on their workers, but it seems that is not true for the Fair Trade–certified ones. There seems to be a lot of projects going on. I even helped the local children to pick plastic on Sunday.
Knowing that Denis had also mentioned wanting to connect with average workers and learning about their struggles, I probed further. I asked what else he knew about Phulrani’s life besides her engagement with the Joint Body. At this, Denis looked completely puzzled and we ended our conversation there.
As I reflected on my interactions with Denis and many other Fair Trade enthusiasts like him I realized how certain institutional arrangements framed their orientation to and experience of plantation life. Coupled with this dynamic, their interest in learning about plantation life post–Fair Trade was a barrier since they had already summed up pre–Fair Trade plantation life as a case of one-sided worker exploitation. While they were not mistaken about worker exploitation in the postcolonial plantation system in India (Chatterjee 2001), the fact that they gave an inordinate amount of agency to Fair Trade for rectifying such exploitation was remarkable since it foreclosed possibilities of seeing plantation workers as having active political lives beyond Fair Trade. Voluntourists focused on projects they could initiate and had no interest in learning about gendered projects of values women cherished.
Therefore, Denis and his like never found out that Phulrani was also a very active member of the leftist labor union until 1985 and was planning to terminate her Joint Body membership very soon after being refused a loan for her husband’s medical treatment. Phulrani told me she was tired of the Joint Body and its projects. I asked why she wanted to leave the Joint Body since she had been a longtime member. I asked, “Don’t you like taking visitors around?” Phulrani replied sarcastically:
They are nice people, they are our pāonā (guests), but they are only interested in Fair Trade and not in us. They want to know more about what the Joint Body is doing than what we are doing. That is why I do not want to tell them anything about myself. Badmouthing the Joint Body is out of the question; I will lose my job then.
Thus, the stories workers shared with Fair Trade enthusiasts were always incomplete.
Denis’s and Phulrani’s respective descriptions of their encounter point to a typical disconnect in exchanges between Fair Trade enthusiasts and plantation workers: just like the encounter between Hayden Zichne and Prema Rai in the previous section of this chapter. Workers like Phulrani, who are otherwise active in improving their lives through local initiatives, did not value the Joint Body. Hence Phulrani’s comment that Fair Trade enthusiasts are “not interested in us.” They perceived the Joint Body to belong to the management and that they had scripted roles in it: Phulrani and other workers compared the Joint Body with a king’s court. Workers considered it their duty to tell Fair Trade enthusiasts about the patent Fair Trade projects since that is what a lot of visitors wanted to participate in. Fair Trade enthusiasts wanted to participate in Fair Trade–related projects as a way “to connect” with producers. As I mentioned earlier, the most common purpose with which Fair Trade enthusiasts identified was the need to connect with local initiatives. The process of connection, as we see here, is fraught with irony since the interactions follow a defined pattern, always within a certain frame.
Ellie told me that she approached the Joint Body at Phulbāri to introduce Andy and herself to “indigenous organic methods.” I asked how they found out that the organic methods were indigenous. Andy explained that he had had long conversations with the plantation managers, who told him about local shamanic traditions and their effects on the practice of organic agriculture. Andy said, “I am so glad that Fair Trade certification is also reviving these local shamanic traditions.” When I asked what they learned, Ellie said, “We met the local shaman and he told us that Fair Trade and organics had improved the air, which surrounded the plantation, and it improved the average worker’s health.” I knew that the local shaman had given them his stock narrative about Fair Trade improving workers’ health. He told me the same thing when I first met him. The same shaman, in other contexts not involving visitors, constantly complained about the acute water shortage on the plantation that was producing various kinds of ailments. He complained to me, “We might breathe fresh air, but cannot control what we eat and drink.” He implied that average workers couldn’t access good nutrition because of all the chemical-induced conventional food that formed their staple diet and was also supplied by plantation’s food system. He often joked saying “the tea plant is better cared for than us.” The form of storytelling about their lives that workers engaged in was limited by their scripted roles within Fair Trade–certified plantations.
Unlike students and volunteers, the tea buyers perhaps had the most deprecatory views about the workers whom they were ultimately aiming to support. I was able to meet and interview seven independent tea buyers who came to live in the two plantations. Overall their stated purpose for visiting was to understand how workers lived and worked in Fair Trade–certified organic plantations in Darjeeling. As mentioned, the tea buyers were almost always housed in the plantation guesthouse, which is how they maximized their interactions with the plantation owner to negotiate good buying deals. Among Fair Trade enthusiasts with whom I interacted, the tea buyers spent the least amount of time with average workers.
A Fair Trade tea buyer proudly commented to me, “At least Fair Trade is doing something good for these illiterate workers, or they would create so much union trouble.” Later, when I searched another independent buyer on the Internet, I found an online interview about the status of a Fair Trade–certified plantation this buyer had visited in Darjeeling in which she proclaimed that “… plantation workers never go on strike, while strikes by the local militant Gurkha population are rife at other plantations.”3 She seemed to be unaware that all plantations in Darjeeling have unions and all plantation workers receive similar benefits through a uniform wage structure mandated by the federal government. But missing in this tea buyer’s analysis was the fact that union activity for workers’ rights has taken many critical turns in Darjeeling over the last two or three decades because of situated historical and political developments related to ethnic subnationalism. What was most alarming was the subtle celebration of the plantation owner’s ability to quell agitating Gurkhas through Fair Trade—repeating the age-old colonial and orientalist representational trope of Nepalis as a martial race with a streak of useless rebelliousness. Although the tea buyers were enthusiastic about connecting with workers, their image of plantation workers in Darjeeling contrasted with their desire to understand workers’ actual lives in Fair Trade–certified plantations.
Similarly, many American volunteers who returned from Darjeeling would phone to tell me about the presentations they made at their college or church about the benefits of Fair Trade in Darjeeling. Through site visits and narratives, these enthusiasts cultivated a sense of themselves as activist consumers participating in real change. However, their visits and the publicity they gave to plantations had an effect that can be understood only by seeing how the management and workers felt about the changes brought about by Fair Trade in the years since 1990.
Fair Trade and Privatized Political Fields
I have already written about plantation manager Mr. Pradhan’s celebration of NGO projects in plantations earlier in this chapter. The age of NGOs marks what I call the era of privatized justice, which I elaborate later. The involvement of NGOs in plantations began with Fair Trade, which indirectly facilitated the sidelining of unions and political questions of wage and other benefits. In the following account based on both historical sketches and interviews I track these changes.
As I reflected on Mr. Pradhan’s comments, I came to realize that these new solidarity practices advanced a very important, albeit unspoken, mission of many plantations: to find new niche markets and more importantly, to keep the unions at bay by making the Joint Body a critical node for solidarity practices. Fair Trade enthusiasts who came with a great desire to participate in and witness Fair Trade were often co-opted into projects that gave them a sense of purpose, but ironically furthered the existing inequities in the plantation.
The significance and effects of witnessing practices created by these peculiar solidarity initiatives can be best understood by locating these practices as a continuation of the longer history of sidelining unions prevalent in Darjeeling’s plantations since the 1980s. Such practices began with the decline in power of labor-focused leftist unions or ABGL. Through my interviews with plantation owners, members of the tea trade bureaucracy, I discovered that the timing of Fair Trade’s entry into plantation life in the early to mid-1990s coincided with a period of union busting peculiar to Darjeeling district. It became apparent that Fair Trade inadvertently provided a necessary cover for the gradual creation of a privatized political field within plantations. The building of Fair Trade–related institutions within plantations—like the Joint Body—only furthered this process. The Joint Body gradually became the face of plantation public life and a poor proxy for elected collective organizing bodies. It gradually replaced institutions like labor unions as a point of introduction for Fair Trade enthusiasts seeking to learn about the region and plantation life. Outside visitors could rarely independently engage with workers and learn about their homegrown efforts to improve their livelihoods and their struggles for justice.
The effects of these political shifts and the creation of a privatized political field were apparent in my interviews with workers. I begin by detailing a common-worker-narrated history of associational life within plantations, as laid out for me by Kamalā in Sonākheti. Many workers in both plantations where I conducted this research echoed the logic of Kamalā’s explanations. Kamalā, unlike the other illiterate or semiliterate women plantation workers I interviewed, had a bachelor’s degree and worked in the plantation’s accounting department. She was the most visible face of the Fair Trade empowerment initiatives on this plantation. She handled major tasks of the Joint Body operations, which also oversaw the emerging home stay program.
Kamalā once asked me whether Joint Body members could directly complain to Fair Trade Labelling Organizations International (FLO) about the plantation’s problems, which they could not communicate to FLO inspectors or liaison officers during the scripted Joint Body meetings. She continued, “Sometimes when Fair Trade inspectors are around, I feel like pulling them aside and telling them the real situation. How can they understand the problems here if they do not speak to common people and do not understand Nepali?” Kamalā agreed that I should not use the real name of the plantation in my publications to protect her identity, but somewhat regretted this since she badly wanted to expose the planter, but was afraid of doing it herself because she had small kids and needed her job.
Educated plantation employees like Kamalā were not the only ones who questioned the politics of knowledge production about Sonākheti. Women tea-pluckers without formal education frequently criticized the strategic use of their images and talents for the pursuit of Fair Trade certification. Lachmi told me that whenever the kuires (white visitors) come to the plantation she takes them around, which is extremely stressful for her because it entails more walking, and often missing lunch and returning home late. She continued:
We do not know each other’s language. We are called to the meeting of the Joint Body where nothing substantial is discussed. We are shown in a way that says nothing about our lives and frustrations. I know the real story; I know what our lives are like. The tourists and other whites take photographs, and I hate it because we are all supposed to smile and they never send the photos back.
Lachmi continued that people made films about the workers that she never got to see. She never understood why foreigners had so much interest in showing a poor worker in a film.
Both Kamalā and Lachmi constantly pointed to a major gap in their interaction with Fair Trade enthusiasts: the disconnect between what visitors could witness about the life of an average worker within a frame and what women workers actually experienced in the plantations. Kamalā underscored in our many conversations that the Joint Body could exist because “no one cares about real labor issues, it’s all a drama.” Probing her further I learned why she made this comment and why workers found the Joint Body ineffective. Kamalā explained to me that the changing dynamics of unions in the plantations came in handy for the plantation management to discipline workers. According to Kamalā, the union was strong in the 1980s, but after the rise of a regionalist party—Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF)—plantation authorities bribed the strongest leftist leader. Part of his bribe was a trip abroad. I found out later from interviewing this leftist union leader that the trip was an opportunity to participate in a FLO-sponsored conference in Europe. Kalama mentioned that after his return from Europe this particular leader refused to take part in union activities. My interviews with present and past union members in Sonākheti and Phulbāri revealed to me how plantation authorities used resources from the Fair Trade movement for strategic purposes that furthered their control over labor.
Kamalā further explained that during the 1980s there had been great union leaders whom the workers revered and the management feared. If the union leaders called for a strike or the house arrest of managers, the workers (both men and women) from the farthest neighborhoods within Sonākheti would march up to the factory. According to Kamalā, who did not support the leftists, the bribery was very strategic for breaking up union solidarity, destroying people’s trust in collective action and the labor-focused leftist parties.
It is important to note that breaking workers’ trust in the leftist party and its focus on raising awareness about labor issues was a strategic move by the owner and a common practice in cases where a plantation owner could support Gorkha political parties like GNLF. Through this act he indirectly signaled his support for the new regional politics between the 19902 and 2000s, for which labor issues were low priority. Post-agitation these strategic activities helped the owner forge profitable relations with new union leaders who now devoted more time to regional politics, which involved making the Nepali plantation workers more conscious of their cultural identity. The intensity of this ethnic turn is detailed in Townsend Middleton’s work.
Despite the plantation owner’s strategic support of regional Nepali politics, his treatment of average workers was questionable to say the least. Even during my research the plantation management was quick to make contributions for building temples and promoting the cultural projects of Nepali workers. The owner consciously supported the “ethnic” needs of his workers, though he frequently invoked ethnic stereotypes of “childishness,” “rebelliousness,” and “immaturity” toward the Nepali men, even in front of outsiders. These stereotypes then found their way onto websites where tea buyers wrote about Fair Trade’s ability to quell troublesome unions. Some plantation worker hosts at Sonāhketi were deeply perturbed when they found out that a voluntourist from New York had complained to the management about being served the same food three days in a row. For me the irony of this complaint was unbelievable. A volunteer comes to get the experience of living in a plantation house but cannot stand the same Nepali meal two or three times in a row. Knowing that the nearest market to buy vegetables was hard to get to would have perhaps helped set her expectation of meals in an average plantation home.
Via plantation documents and online information I discovered that the first Joint Bodies were formed in Sonākheti in 1994 and in Phulbāri in 1996, when Fair Trade activities started increasing in this region and the first efforts to grow organic tea began. The plantation management took advantage of these new sustainability initiatives and shifts in regional politics to ensure that difficult questions about better health care, increasing casualization of labor, housing improvement, nepotism, verbal abuse of workers, and promotion of women workers would not be raised, while they posted lofty claims about women’s empowerment and women supervisors on the plantation website. Beginning at that time, the Joint Body—supposedly formed of union representatives, ordinary workers, and managers—became and continues to be dominated by the management and the workers it hand-picks (like Kamalā) who rarely raise such difficult structural issues in meetings. The particularities of union busting and Joint Body creation might be peculiar to the Sonāhketi plantation, but my interviews with older workers in Phulbāri and local researchers revealed that during the mid-1990s plantations came up with many strategies to delegitimize leftist unions, since any sustained movement for wage or benefits reform would hurt the profits of planters who were facing declining yields. Many workers also mentioned that the plantation owners resisted complying with the standards of the Indian Plantation Labor Act of 1951 that was supposed to guarantee forms of worker well-being within plantations and associated reform.
The trajectory of Fair Trade’s entry into Darjeeling plantations coincided with and at times facilitated a particular form of neglecting labor issues. This was ironic since it went against a core principle of the Fair Trade movement: strengthening of collective bargaining institutions. Unlike other industries in India, where union busting continues on a regular basis, in Darjeeling it took hold and continued with the rise of “sustainable” tea production and regeneration of the area through Fair Trade. The solidarity initiatives I have described throughout this chapter continue to further this pattern.
Conclusion
Western political consumerism’s foot soldiers have possibly never had so many options for promoting social justice in the global South, beginning with their morning cup of Fair Trade tea or coffee. As I have shown, the tide of political consumerism has transformed Fair Trade and its associated practices into a new kind of transnational praxis that involves particular forms of framed engagements with workers and knowledge production about producer communities in the global South. New rituals of transnational praxis involving observing, reporting, recollecting, and witnessing justice delivery by Fair Trade enthusiasts conjures up a world that can be changed through buying and selling goods under the Fair Trade label (Tsing 2000). These practices inadvertently compromise Fair Trade’s mission of promoting better worker-management partnerships through creating new institutions like the Joint Body that are not accountable to local communities in the same way as labor unions. It also leads to a simplistic celebration of small farmer organizations like SKS without attending associated contracts with plantations.
In Darjeeling’s tea plantations, Fair Trade experts (plantation managers, Fair Trade enthusiasts, NGOs, certifiers) talk of justice and highlight that individual workers can be empowered through a loan, a cow, or “self-help.” Although new privately managed institutions like the Joint Body check for and prevent child labor abuse or lessen the use of plastic in production, there is a deafening silence on structural issues like daily wages—the single most important factor shaping worker empowerment and economic justice fought for by local labor unions. The recent wage increase in Darjeeling plantations took place without any intervention from Fair Trade experts, plantation owners, or the Joint Body. The change became possible when regional political parties adopted a wage hike for workers as one of its core agendas in fighting for greater citizenship rights for Nepali minorities within India via Gorkhaland Movement 2. The need for increased wages has been a topic of common concern among workers ever since I began research, but I never witnessed it being discussed in Joint Body meetings.
While activist consumers continue to play a key role in raising awareness about fair labor practices and broader issues of inequity in global trade (Doane 2010; Goodman 2010), certain aspects of their engagements in Fair Trade–certified production niches have not been explored in detail. My observation of the activities of Fair Trade enthusiasts in this chapter is to help begin that discussion. This group is involved in powerful forms of witnessing that could determine the legitimacy of the social justice claims of Fair Trade products in the face of increased mainstreaming of the social justice goals of Fair Trade (Raynolds 2009). These Fair Trade enthusiasts not only visit and experience, but also disseminate information about their eyewitness experiences of the benefits of Fair Trade–certified workplaces in creative ways on their return to their home countries. They advance an affective soft-biopolitics that assesses Fair Trade’s success on just-in-time parameters and produces virtualities about worker life.
Such actions potentially may influence future consumer-citizens’ support for Fair Trade products. While student activists in the global North caution against the increased mainstreaming of Fair Trade’s goals (see Wilson and Curnow 2013), the witnessing practices of Fair Trade enthusiasts could help Fair Trade maintain its legitimacy as a consumer-based movement that promises to improve the lives of average plantation.
I urge students, consumer activists, and practitioners of Fair Trade who want to demonstrate solidarity with producers and workers in the global South to invest more time in learning about regional histories and situated struggles of producer communities. Such learning might not necessarily be enabled by involvement in Fair Trade−related projects or institutions. Learning about the complex political lives of subjects of injustice will enable them to understand: (a) where their own solidarity related efforts could make the most difference in the lives of workers and farmers; and (b) prevent cooptation of their well-meaning solidarity building efforts.