Harvesting consent: South Asian tea plantation workers’ experience of Fairtrade certification

Karin Astrid Siegmannhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-6664-9249

Abstract

Fairtrade certification of plantations seeks to productively intervene in the continuity of exploitative labor conditions that tea plantation workers in South Asia have experienced since the plantations’ inception under colonial rule. Based on a mixed methods study conducted in 2016 in India and Sri Lanka, this article engages with the puzzling reinterpretation of certification as a reward for workers’ commitment rather than for management's compliance. By taking labor process theory on a journey to transnational labor governance in Indian and Sri Lankan tea plantations, the article argues that Fairtrade certification provides plantation companies with tools to ‘harvest workers’ consent’ to management's pursuit of profit.

Keywords

Fairtrade certification, India, labor process theory, plantation labor, Sri Lanka, tea plantations

Contact Karin Astrid Siegmann

[email protected]

International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), Kortenaerkade 12, The Hague 2518AX, The Netherlands

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

‘Fairtrade will check the quality of the tea.

If it's not up to the mark, the certificate will get cancelled’

Male tea plantation worker, Fairtrade-certified tea estate in Sri Lanka

1. Introduction

Engaging in a conversation between transnational labor governance and labor process theory, this article analyzes the reinterpretation of Fairtrade certification as rewarding labor productivity rather than labor rights guarantees in South Asian tea plantations.¹

Transnational governance through certification figures in few of the recent scholarly contributions that have placed labor center-stage in the analysis of global value chains (GVCs) (e.g. Anner 2015; Mezzadri 2017; Phillips 2011; Selwyn 2012; Newsome et al. 2015). Widespread in agri-food chains, certification involves companies’ adherence to a set of social and environmental standards. For instance, labor rights commitments are a common component of a range of ‘sustainable roundtable’ initiatives (e.g. Fortin 2018; Pye 2010).

Fairtrade International coordinates one of the most socially ambitious certifications in the agri-food sector. Originally established to promote fairer trading conditions between countries located in the global South and North, in the 1990s, the organization extended its program from smallholders to plantations. This was motivated by both equity and economic concerns: Landless rural workers were seen as equally deserving of support as peasants, but besides, many crops were not produced in sufficient quantities by small farmers to satisfy demand (Raynolds 2017, 1477). Yet, while Fairtrade's smallholder program is comparatively well-studied, far less is known about its certification of plantations (Raynolds 2017, 1474). In the following, this article focuses on Fairtrade's plantation program.

The 2014 Fairtrade Standard for Hired Labour demands the guarantee of labor rights and good environmental conditions, as well as the democratic governance of the Fairtrade Premium for certified produce by the receiving plantation workers through the so-called Fairtrade Premium Committee (FPC). Premium-funded projects are to benefit workers’, their families’ and communities’ social development, while expenditures for which the company is responsible are excluded from the premium's ambit (Fairtrade International 2014).

Fairtrade's success in promoting decent work in plantations has been uneven at best. Raynolds (2014) and Riisgaard (2015) document the certifier's contribution to advancing occupational health and safety practices in the chemical-intensive flower industry of Latin America and East Africa, while it falls short of supporting the payment of a living wage to workers. This ineffectiveness to contribute to raising plantation workers’ poverty wages has been identified in contexts as diverse as banana plantations and vineyards in Latin America (Staricco and Ponte 2015; Van Rijn et al. 2020) and the tea, coffee, and flower sectors in East Africa (Cramer et al. 2017). While in the South African wine industry, the integration of Fairtrade standards with the national policy of ‘Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment’ has helped to avoid the reproduction of racialized hierarchies between farmworkers and management – and to counter them (Herman 2010), on Indian tea plantations, Besky (2014), Makita (2012) and Sen (2017) detail how ‘Fairtrade organisations have failed to be transformative because of their neglect of the intersecting class-, caste-, gender- and ethnicity-based identities and struggles of plantation labourers’ (Siegmann et al. 2019, 65).

Often, the mismatch between the certifier's ambitions and agricultural laborers’ realities is located in shortcomings of Fairtrade's governance (e.g. Bacon 2010). Here, Staricco (2019) calls attention to the contradictory, yet, unacknowledged interests of different class fractions in the Fairtrade system. Akin to Fischer, Victor, and Asturias de Barrios’ (2021) examination of what the Fairtrade project looks like from the perspective of Central American coffee growers, this article, in contrast, zooms in on how class-based interests and contradictions are negotiated in workers’ lived experience of Fairtrade in South Asian tea plantations.

South Asia is a key region for Fairtrade's labor program. The cultivation, harvest and processing of tea involves a higher number of wageworkers than any other Fairtrade product, most of whom live and work in India and Sri Lanka² (Fairtrade International 2018, 87; Fairtrade International 2020, 13). Originally, our 2016 Fairtrade-commissioned study that combined qualitative interviews with a worker survey sought to trace the impact of Fairtrade certification on labor conditions and collective agency of tea plantation workers in these two countries. As a side product, our study also uncovered a puzzling reinterpretation of the logic of Fairtrade certification. The opening quote exemplifies that, across the diverse settings of our study, South Asian tea plantation workers widely understand certification as a reward for higher quality tea rather than as verifying decent labor conditions.

This reinterpretation of Fairtrade certification from production practices to tea traits represents the starting point of this article. It explores patterns of tea plantation workers’ experience of certification that emerge across diverse study regions and reads them through the lens of Burawoy’s (1979) theory of ‘manufacturing consent’. His seminal contribution to labor process theory shows how the specific organization of the labor process contributes to shaping workers’ consent to exploitative labor conditions, making it an adequate perspective to engage with the bewildering translation of certification standards into workers’ experiences.

By taking Burawoy's labor process theory on a journey to transnational labor governance in South Asian plantations, this article contributes to critical agrarian studies in several ways. Firstly, it contributes to the field's reorientation towards labor that different authors have demanded in this journal (e.g. Li 2011; Oya 2013, 1554; Pye 2021). More specifically, it takes worker subjectivity – or what Breman and Daniel (1992, 268) call ‘coolies’ perception of themselves’ – on board without using it to justify exploitative relations of production either through a neoclassical model of rational choice or a culturalist understanding of survival strategies (Brass and Bernstein 1992, 5). Secondly, by drawing attention to the ways in which certification becomes subordinate to plantation management's pursuit of profit, the present analysis enriches our understanding of the limitations of Fairtrade to positively transform labor conditions for plantation labor. Lastly, by embedding Burawoy’s (1979) class-focused analysis in a broader background of – especially gendered – nonwork identities and workplace context, my analysis calls into question the assumption of a clear-cut distinction between labor governance through coercion or consent, that way supporting calls for an intersectional extension of Burawoy's theory.

I develop my argument in six steps. The next section introduces the context of labor conditions and their governance in the tea sectors of India and Sri Lanka. It is followed by an outline of Burawoy’s (1979) labor process theory (section 3) and an overview of the study's methodology (section 4). Subsequently, workers’ lived experiences of Fairtrade certification are presented and analyzed from a labor process perspective in section 5. Based on that, I conclude that the current management-mediated system of certification provides tea plantation companies with tools to ‘harvest workers’ consent’ to profit accumulation. This leads to a paradoxical result: Whereas Fairtrade set out to foster egalitarian trade relations, this way, certification contributes to reproducing some of the unequal power relations that impoverish and marginalize tea plantation workers.

2. Labor governance in the tea value chain

South Asian tea plantation workers’ persistent poverty is embedded in the historically skewed value distribution in the global tea value chain. It contrasts with India and Sri Lanka's leading position in this chain. India is the second largest tea producer after China, while Sri Lanka follows China in tea exports (FAOSTAT 2020). Especially in India, a significant share of that production originates from plantations (FAO IGG 2011, 1; Ministry of Plantation Industries & Export Agriculture of Sri Lanka 2020, 30).

Within the two countries, tea cultivation is concentrated in a few regions. In India, the bulk of tea production takes place in the Northern states of Assam and West Bengal. More than 90 per cent of tea plantation workers are employed in these two states. The greater part of South Indian tea is cultivated in Tamil Nadu, followed by Kerala (Indian Tea Association 2020; Tea Board of India 2017, 89, 91). Sri Lanka's tea plantations are concentrated in the highlands of the Nuwara Eliya, Badulla and Kandy districts (Ministry of Plantation Industries & Export Agriculture of Sri Lanka 2020, 4, 24).

The promotion of tea exports from South Asia by the British colonial government to provide cheap consumption goods for the growing working class in Great Britain laid the groundwork for the contemporary tea value chain. The tea industry's export orientation made price fluctuations on the international market a serious concern. In this context, profitability was sustained by keeping labor costs as low as possible. This was guaranteed by the employment of migrant labor working under extremely exploitative conditions in virtual enclaves under management controls that were reminiscent of the slave plantations (Behal and Mohapatra 1992; Gupta 1992; Jayawardena and Kurian 2015).

Retailers and brand name companies have held a persistently strong role in the tea value chain's governance. While the dominance of corporate power typifies neoliberal capitalism, in the tea value chain, its historical roots reach back to what Manjapra (2018, 377) terms ‘the consolidation of the global racial agrarian regime under the sway of great multinational corporations’ since the 1870s that catered to the needs of increasingly rapid capitalist industrialization (Brass and Bernstein 1992, 4). To date, this dominance enables them to capture a significant proportion of value in the chain.

The power hierarchy between multinational corporations – largely – headquartered in the global North and Southern producers intersects with different forms of marginalization along the lines of ethnicity, caste and gender at the level of tea plantations. These marginalizations weaken workers’ bargaining power, cheapen labor supply and lower product prices (Sharma 2016, 119–124).

In Sri Lanka, descendants of Tamil migrant labor recruited by the colonial administration through brokers from the lowest castes in South India still form the majority of the workforce on the island's tea plantations (Bass 2013, 11, 27–28). Utilizing caste hierarchies for colonial labor governance, labor supervisors have historically belonged to upper castes, a pattern that is no longer so prominent (Jayawardena and Kurian 2015, 40–41).

Tea plantation workers in Assam are mainly descendants of domestic migrants recruited as indentured laborers from the tribal belt of Central India. In the mid-nineteenth century, planters resorted to a policy of organized recruitment of plantation labor from tribal or adivasi communities after attempts to mobilize local peasant communities for plantation employment had failed (Gupta 1992, 180). Similar to the labor organization in Sri Lankan tea estates, hierarchies of caste and ethnicity served to fortify class difference. Not considered indigenous to the state, the so-called ‘tea tribes’ subordination based on class and ethnicity has been reproduced and exacerbated by their lack of legal recognition as scheduled tribes in Assam.

In the tea plantations of South India, the majority of the contemporary workforce belongs to the scheduled castes (Labour Bureau 2009, 19). Here, ethnic divides have recently gained in importance. While post-Independence, Tamils have continued to represent the predominant group among plantation laborers since their colonial recruitment, in recent years, South Indian tea plantations have responded to labor scarcity by increased recruitment of tribal workers from Assam, Odisha, and Jharkhand (Lalitha et al. 2013, 35; Raj 2019, 679). Both tribal populations and members of scheduled castes or Dalits belong to the most marginalized segments of the Indian population.

In India and Sri Lanka, the labor-intensive plucking of tea is chiefly undertaken by women workers, while men dominate the workforce in the tea factories as well as in other field work and supervisory positions (Bass 2013, 42–43; Lalitha et al. 2013, 22–23; Sharma 2016, 119, 123). Jayawardena and Kurian (2015, 41) pinpoint the economic logic that has undergirded this gender division of labor. For the early period of tea cultivation in Sri Lanka, they show how patriarchal ideologies steeped in religious norms supported labor control and helped to justify the payment of lower wages to women workers. Planters therefore actively recruited women workers for the labor-intensive tea harvest that was initially undertaken by men. In colonial Assam, planters argued that the work in the tea leaf harvest was ‘suitable’ for female migrant workers because of its similarity with the agricultural tasks that women undertook in their areas of origin (Sen 2004, 90).

Economic incentives are woven into these interlaced social structures that have facilitated accumulation in the global tea chain. When tea producer prices fell dramatically between 1984 and 2005, Indian tea plantation owners successfully argued for a freeze in base wages. Besides, they implemented a range of incentive mechanisms that rewarded workers for increased daily harvesting volumes and resulted in work intensification (Neilson and Pritchard 2010, 1897). Sri Lankan tea plantation companies have framed workers’ productivity as low in international comparison despite contrary evidence. Based on that, they too have lobbied in favor of linking remuneration to productivity and have introduced new models of production through outgrowing and revenue-sharing programs since 2005 (Jegathesan 2019, 20).

As a result, for female tea pluckers, earnings are a complex combination of daily rates and productivity-based payments. Both in India and Sri Lanka, plantation workers’ daily base wages are determined through processes of collective bargaining. Defeating the purpose of time-rated income, the base wage requires workers to harvest a stipulated minimum quota of tea leaves per day. This base wage is combined with a piece-rated incentive, which encourages tea pluckers to harvest above the fixed target. During peak harvesting seasons, this system allows pluckers to increase their daily earnings substantially, depending on the extra kilograms of leaves plucked. Table 1 provides the wage rates and tea pluckers’ targets that prevailed during our field work.

Table 1. Tea plantation workers’ daily base wages and tea pluckers’ harvesting targets by state, 2016. (Table view)

State/country	Base wage (US$)	Harvesting target (kg)
Kerala	4.29	27
Tamil Nadu	3.42	24
Assam	1.79	24
Sri Lanka	2.90	16

Source: Modes are calculated from the worker survey.

Note: During the time of the field research, 1 US$ equaled LKR 137.13 and INR 64.75 (based on oanda.com).

While Gupta (1992, 184) argues that under colonial rule, wages in the Assam tea plantations were fixed below subsistence level to compel whole families to work in the tea plantations, to date, Indian and Sri Lankan tea workers’ earnings fall short of what is necessary to guarantee a decent living standard (Bhowmik 2015, 29; LeBaron 2018, 20; Thibbotuwawa et al. 2019).

The role of incentive payments that guarantee maximum effort at low cost for the plantation company is gendered. For female pluckers, extra work to generate incentive earnings make it difficult to find time for trade union-related activities: Their eight-hour working days are longer than those of male field workers who commonly spend around six hours in the estate. The time pluckers use to increase their earnings through incentive payments comes on top of this. A trend of increasing daily harvesting targets has further intensified their work and, in fact, gradually eroded their earnings (Gunetilleke, Kuruppu, and Goonasekera 2008, 36; Sharma 2016, 119–21).

Such income and time poverty contrasts with tea workers’ protection through unionization and legislation. Especially after Independence, unionization spread rapidly in both India and Sri Lanka, with major plantation unions being affiliated to political parties (Bhowmik 2011; Jayawardena and Kurian 2015). Nowadays, in both countries, the level of unionization is high among both female and male plantation workers, yet, union leadership has remained dominated by men (Kurian and Jayawardena 2017, 39–40; Sarkar and Bhowmik 1998).

Independence also brought with it a strengthening of tea plantation workers’ rights through formal regulation. In Sri Lankan estates, collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) regulate labor rights and workers’ welfare given that working and living conditions are intertwined in the enclave economy of tea plantations. In India, the 1951 Plantation Labour Act (PLA) guarantees plantation workers’ social welfare, insisting that owners provide workers housing, health care, food rations, and schooling for their children (Besky 2014, 120). Along with the Factories Act, it also regulates working conditions (Bhowmik 2011, 242).

The fact that social and legal protection in South Asian tea plantations has not guaranteed workers’ empowerment and the alleviation of their poverty has led to workers’ growing disenfranchisement from their trade unions. Workers’ dissatisfaction with politicized trade unions is rooted in the perception of unions’ collusion with management (e.g. Bass 2013; Raj 2019). It is particularly pronounced in Assam where the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC)-led Assam Cha Mazdoor Sangha (ACMS) holds a virtual ‘union monopoly’ over almost all the tea plantations in the state (Bhowmik 2015, 31–32).

In recent decades, population growth and infrastructure development have led to tea plantations’ increased integration into the surrounding economy, paralleled by better access to employment outside the estate. Among others, the entitlement to 100 days of employment in public works programs remunerated at the minimum wage for every rural household under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) provides a more remunerative alternative to poorly paid plantation work in India (Kumar 2022).

Such job opportunities outside the estate have largely benefitted men. Lalitha et al. (2013, 41) relate this to the gender division of tasks in the estate. The more permanent nature of women's work in the tea leaf harvest, their longer working hours as well as their responsibility for domestic chores curbs women workers’ ability to complement estate employment with additional income sources. Labor scarcity in tea plantations has been a common result of men's take up of alternative employment, affecting South Indian estates in particular (Jegathesan 2019; Lalitha et al. 2013, 94).

As a transnational form of labor governance, Fairtrade entered South Asian tea plantations during the 1990s. Amidst a period of falling tea prices, plantation owners saw certification schemes as an additional point of brand differentiation, enabling them to tap into new markets (Besky 2014, 115; Neilson and Pritchard 2010, 1844). Fairtrade foregrounded tea plantation workers’ poverty and marginalization when motivating the extension of its program from smallholder agriculture to plantations. The certifier's effectiveness in this regard has been called into question, though. Reflecting research on other products and regions, studies on the role of Fairtrade in South Asian tea plantations bring to the fore that workers’ wages have remained low and insufficient despite certification (Lalitha et al. 2013, 42; LeBaron 2018, 3; Siegmann et al. 2019, 76–79). Studies of Darjeeling tea plantations found that, rather than offering a space for workers’ democratic decision-making and collective action, the FPC was often dominated by the estate management (Besky 2014, 121–6; Sen 2017, 79–80). Makita (2012) therefore argues that Fairtrade certification reproduces the patron-client hierarchy between management and workers inherited from the plantations’ colonial origins.

The present study engages with how the divergent rationales for Fairtrade certification are negotiated at the level of tea plantations and experienced by workers. It broadens previous studies’ geographical scope to include Fairtrade-certified plantations both in different Indian states and Sri Lanka. Besides, it deepens the engagement with Fairtrade's role in the reproduction of class hierarchies by looking at them through the lens of Burawoy's labor process theory, a sketch of which is provided in the section that follows.

3. Manufacturing consent through workplace ‘games’

Burawoy’s (1979) volume Manufacturing consent has underlined that, beyond forms of coercion, the labor process under advanced capitalism relies on workers’ consent to management's pursuit of profit. Consent is necessary because, as a result of labor regulation, the wage becomes increasingly independent of workers’ individual effort (Burawoy 1979, 30). It implies that workers accept an understanding of profit as being based on the sale of commodities that runs counter their own experience, namely that value is created through their labor. This is the case, especially, if they ‘[…] regard their future livelihood as contingent on the survival and expansion of their capitalist employer’ (Burawoy 1979, 29).

Burawoy (1979, 27) sees the basis of consent ‘[…] in the organization of activities as though they presented the worker with real choices, however narrowly defined these choices might be’. According to him, capitalist production is enabled by the interplay of both ‘real’ and ‘lived’ relations of production (Burawoy 1979, 16). Real relations of production refer to the production and appropriation of surplus. Yet, it is the lived, subjective experience of these relations that shapes workers’ understanding of and interests in the labor process.

Rather than being given primordially or shaped by socialization, Burawoy shows that, once basic survival is assured, workers’ interests, are organized by the specific form of relations in production (Burawoy 1979, 85). This re-introduction of subjectivity into labor process analysis is considered a key contribution of his work. Yet, the resulting emphasis on workers’ position in the labor process at the expense of gender and other social identities has been criticized for reinstating subjectivities in a very limited fashion (Davies 1990, 402).

In his ethnographic study of an engineering company in the US of the 1970s, Burawoy identifies the organization of consent through what he terms ‘workplace games’. The choices presented to operators and their interests revolve around the game of ‘making out’. Making out refers to workers’ effort to achieve levels of production that earn them incentive pay. The fact that workers evaluate the game's outcome based on whether incentive pay is being earned, masks its wider result, namely profit generation (Burawoy 1979, 82). By pointing out that the management was actively engaged in the game of making out, Burawoy shows that the game aligned workers’ interests with management's profit orientation. Playing the game of increased effort generates consent as ‘[…] one cannot both play the game and at the same time question its rules’ (Burawoy 1979, 81).

The game metaphor highlights the limitations of workers’ individual agency:

Just as players in a game adopt strategies that affect outcomes, but not always in the ways intended, so in our daily life we make choices in order to affect outcomes. The possible variation of outcomes is limited but is not entirely beyond our control. That is, we do make history, but not as we please. (Burawoy 1979, 92–93)

While workplace games provide temporary relief in a regime of scarcity, simultaneously, they reproduce capitalist relations and expand surplus production (Burawoy 1979, 77–81). Moreover, Burawoy (1979, 86) highlights the possibility that playing the game may undermine the rules that define it. For instance, workers may find themselves in a ‘prisoner's dilemma’ as ‘[…] what is in the interests of the individual worker – the maximization of output – operates to undermine the workers’ collective interest – higher piecework prices’.

While the realities of an industrial workplace in the US of the 1970s seem far removed from the labor process in South Asian tea plantations, there are parallels that suggest the relevance of Burawoy's framework for the present analysis. Mintz (1985, 51) identified ‘[…] heavy substitution of machinery for human labor, mass production on large holdings, intensive use of scientific methods and products’ as characteristic features of the ‘agro-industrial’ plantation mode of production. Its source of labor productivity distinguishes plantation production from manufacturing, though. While ‘scientific management’ in Western manufacturing had brought about considerable technological innovations, especially in the area of labor-saving techniques of production, in plantations, productivity increases have historically been connected to work intensification through supervision and skill development through repetition (Kurian 2018, 16).

While critical agrarian studies of the ‘industrial plantation’ under colonial rule emphasize the ability of capital to engineer unfreedom in labor markets (see, e.g. contributions to the special issue of this journal edited by Brass and Bernstein 1992), the present analysis foregrounds the role and – especially – ‘manufacturing’ of consent. In the context of formal guarantees of South Asian tea plantation laborers’ base wages, the organization of consent is necessary to ensure and increase workers’ effort. This is especially relevant given tea plantation companies’ embeddedness in the global tea chain characterized by the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few brands and the deteriorating terms of trade that South Asian tea producers have faced since the 1990s.

4. Methodology

The data on which the present analysis is based were generated for a study commissioned by Fairtrade International. The study's original objective to identify the role of Fairtrade certification for South Asian tea plantation workers’ labor conditions and collective agency differ from this article's aim, namely the exploration of an emerging pattern of worker's reinterpretation of Fairtrade certification. Yet, albeit generated for a different purpose, the richness of the mixed methods data described below offered material for a productive exploration.

Empirical data were generated in eight certified tea plantations in India and Sri Lanka during the period of July to September 2016 (Table 2). These estates were identified by stratified random sampling from a list of certified plantations provided by Fairtrade International. This sampling frame was layered by region – Sri Lanka, South India and Assam – as well as by the share of certified sales.

Table 2. Summary research participants in certified plantations by region. (Table view)

Region / country	Certified estates	Participants worker survey (% female)	Age range (mean)	Primary education or less (%)	Scheduled caste / tribal background (%)*	Share FPC members (%)	Participants female / male groups FGDs	Key informant interviews
South India	3	104 (71)	28–60 (48)	99	92	6	35 / 22	FPC (3), M (3), W (3)
Assam	2	75 (56)	23–72 (41)	97	85	3	20 / 18	FPC (2), M (2), W (1)
Sri Lanka	3	102 (73)	26–58 (42)	73	–	31	24 / 27	FPC (3), M (6), W (4)

Notes: FPC = Fairtrade Premium Committee, M = estate management, W = worker representatives.

*The figure for South India refers to scheduled caste background. This group also includes persons belonging to ‘Most backward classes’ and ‘Other eligible communities’ that are included in the Kerala scheduled caste list. The figure for Assam covers tribal background. In Sri Lanka, the survey did not include a question about caste.

We adopted a mixed methods approach to data generation to draw from the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative research. Prioritizing workers’ perspectives, we generated data through qualitative interviews in the form of gender-segmented focus group discussions (FGDs) with tea plantation workers and semi-structured key informant interviews with representatives of trade unions, the FPC, the estate management and other actors in the tea industry.

A survey of field and factory workers complemented the qualitative interviews. Operationalizing Fairtrade International's abovementioned research objective, both qualitative interviews and the survey focused on wages and working conditions, possibilities for workers’ collective action as well as on the role of Fairtrade certification in the estate. Workers were invited to participate in the survey through simple random sampling from a list of eligible workers provided by the estate management. As a result, a total of 281 structured interviews were conducted, out of which more than two-thirds with women.

The high concentration of workers who belong to severely marginalized groups based on their caste and ethnic background is rooted in the colonial practices of labor recruitment and governance outlined above. There are indications that the FPC reflects these social hierarchies. For instance, workers with a more privileged ‘Other Backward Class’ (OBC) background in South India are better represented in the FPC (13 per cent are members) compared to survey participants belonging to scheduled caste communities out of which 5 per cent are FPC members. While the Sri Lankan survey did not include a question about caste due to the sensitivity of the issue, the fact that all survey participants list Tamil as their mother tongue mirrors the continuity of the historical ethnic composition of the plantation labor force.

The research design shaped what research participants shared with us. The association with Fairtrade proved to be a double-edged sword: It facilitated access to workers, yet, despite the repeated assertion of our independence, the research team was often perceived as Fairtrade auditors. It is likely that this led workers and management to foreground the positive effects of certification. In the context of the present analysis, I estimate that such a dynamic actually makes the reporting of experiences that deviate from Fairtrade's own logic, such as workers’ reinterpretations of certification, more credible.

Transcripts and field notes from qualitative interviews were coded and analyzed thematically with support of the software for qualitative data analysis atlas.ti, while the analysis of the worker survey with the software package SPSS focused on uni- and bivariate descriptive statistics. Tables and figures are based on the analysis of the survey data, unless other sources are provided.

Last but not least, the anonymization of research participants’ identities as well as of estates and their locations has been a key ethical principle informing the research. This has been guided by an effort to minimize possible harm to research participants. Besides, guaranteeing anonymity was also important to motivate plantation companies to grant the research team access to the estate. This commitment implies that little contextual information is provided in the presentation of the empirical data below.

5. How Fairtrade helps harvesting tea plantation workers’ consent

Seeking to understand how South Asian tea plantation workers’ interpretation of Fairtrade has been shaped, this section reads their experiences through the lens of Burawoy's theory of the organization of workers’ consent. With Burawoy (1979, 16, 85), I assume that workers’ lived experience of relations of production is crucial in molding their understanding of and interests in the labor process.

The subsections that follow bring to the fore that workers’ experiences with Fairtrade center around material and discursive practices that contribute to their identification with management's interests in higher productivity. I demonstrate this by, firstly, providing more detailed evidence for workers’ understanding of certification as a reward for their commitment at work. Secondly, I trace workers’ experience of the ties between Fairtrade, premium investments and the estate management that turn the premium into a tool for labor governance. Thirdly, zooming in on premium uses which directly incentivize South Asian tea plantation workers’ effort, I identify and critically interrogate parallels between these and Burawoy's workplace games. Lastly, the fourth subsection recognizes Fairtrade-funded trainings as an alternative mechanism to catalyze convergence of workers’ and management's interest in higher productivity.

5.1. ‘If we work more, we get more funds’ – certifying workers’ commitment rather than management compliance

While for Fairtrade, their certification is a prize for companies’ social production practices, in both India and Sri Lanka, the tea plantation worker survey brings to the fore that a strikingly common understanding of Fairtrade certification is that the estate receives extra money for good quality tea (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Workers’ understanding of Fairtrade certification by region (%).
Note: The graph summarizes re-coded responses to the open survey question ‘According to you, what does Fairtrade certification of tea mean?’. Figures refer to the number of responses. Multiple responses per survey participant were possible. A few ‘other’ responses which did not match the listed most common categories were excluded.

In both Sri Lanka and Assam, asked about their understanding of Fairtrade certification, ‘Premium for tea quality’ is survey participants’ most important substantive response, besides a significant group of workers in Assam, in particular, which is unaware of what Fairtrade is. In South India, this is the third most important substantive response and a close runner-up to the second. What makes the widespread perception of certification as a premium for quality tea significant is that, in contrast to the other substantive responses, it is unrelated to Fairtrade's certification design which emphasizes the guarantee of labor rights and worker communities’ social development.

In qualitative interviews, too, certification is framed as a reward for workers’ commitment rather than for management's compliance. Yet, while the survey results foreground the product quality resulting from workers’ effort, in the qualitative interviews, tea plantation laborers also refer to the quantity of tea sales and the associated premium funds which incentivize them to work harder and more. The following statement by a male field supervisor and FPC member in a certified estate in South India exemplifies this. Even when asked specifically about the role of Fairtrade certification for working conditions, he foregrounds the role of the Fairtrade Premium: ‘[Fairtrade] has made a drastic change among us. We are motivated to work more, we feel that if we work more, we get more [premium] funds. It improves our standard of living’. Expressing appreciation for the benefits of the premium fund for workers’ social development through investments, e.g. in workers’ and their families’ education and health and infrastructural improvements, such as in housing and roads (Viswanathan 2021, 67–68), he narrowly locates the cause of these benefits in plantation laborers’ harder work that increases tea sales. The estate management's required compliance with Fairtrade's Standard to ‘[…] pay decent wages, guarantee the right to join trade unions, and make certain that health, safety and environmental principles are adhered to’ (Fairtrade International 2014, 3) remains outside this frame. What has shaped this understanding of Fairtrade certification?

5.2. ‘People won't utter a word against those to whom they are indebted’ – using premium funds for labor governance

Workers’ experience of Fairtrade is mediated by the FPC and the uses of the Fairtrade Premium decided in it. The crucial role of premium uses in shaping workers’ understanding of Fairtrade is reflected in the way in which a male trade union representative in a South Indian estate delineates the FPC's mandate: ‘In the Fairtrade meeting, they only discuss how much premium the estate received and what we can do with it etc. They don't discuss anything about labor rights’. Given that most premium investments address workers’ and their communities’ social development, this implies that workers do not associate Fairtrade with the implementation of better labor practices by their employer.

In line with this framing of certification as providing welfare rather than guaranteeing rights, workers often associate the terms ‘help’ and ‘support’ with Fairtrade. A discussion among male workers in a Sri Lankan estate illustrates this. Dissatisfied with the inadequacy of wages to cover daily expenses, an FGD participant suggests: ‘We have to talk about Fairtrade at this point. They have provided a lot of help in times like this’. He proceeds to talk about loans, a common use of the Fairtrade Premium in Sri Lanka. For him, Fairtrade narrowly refers to the FPC here. Ironically, the committee's ‘help’ through premium investments enables consumption smoothing made necessary by poverty wages, rather than directly contributing to a living wage in line with Fairtrade's ambition (Fairtrade International 2014, 28). In this context, Besky (2014, 114) argues that Fairtrade's emphasis on loans obscures its inability to regulate wages on plantations. The resulting foregrounding of charitable giving echoes Dolan's (2008, 2010) findings in the Kenyan tea sector where premium uses are steeped in a long lineage of caring assistance over the ‘colonial other’ while the premium ‘[…] neither remunerated [producers] for their productive work nor altered their standard of living’ (Dolan 2010, 38).

The boundaries between the FPC and management are frequently blurred here. Commenting on the practice to deduct premium-funded loan repayments directly from wages, a male medical officer and FPC member in the same Sri Lankan plantation states: ‘They have the authority to deduct the loan amount from our salary. We are deducting the money given to them, no?’. His shift from ‘they’ to ‘we’ is interesting in this regard. First, he acknowledges the management's authority to deduct installments from workers’ wages. Implying the perception of a class divide, the management is referred to as ‘they’, the other of workers, among which he includes himself. In the second sentence, the ‘we’ transforms into the FPC, the actor implementing deductions as the provider of the loan. Here, workers become the other (‘them’) of a coalition of management and FPC. The fact that he belongs to the more privileged office staff may explain the greater closeness to the management that his statement expresses. Overall, while we did not generate systematic information about the committee's composition per estate, our qualitative interviews suggest a relatively high representation of field supervisors and office staff among the FPC's worker representatives. Besides, the act of deciding about premium-funded benefits which are subsequently being administered by the management seems to promote an identification with management.

The survey reflects this porous line between FPC and management. Echoing earlier studies and contrasting with the merely advisory role that Fairtrade foresees for them in the FPC (Fairtrade International 2014, 10–14), especially in Indian estates, management members are very influential in the committee (Figure 2). In South India, almost all survey respondents perceive workers and management members of the FPC as ‘extremely influential’. This is even more pronounced in Assam, where significantly more respondents consider appointed management members extremely influential in the FPC compared to the elected worker members.

Figure 2. Perception of FPC worker and management members as extremely influential by region (%).

The close connection between Fairtrade, premium investment, and estate management that workers experience makes the premium a potential tool for labor governance. Mirroring Makita’s (2012) understanding of the Fairtrade Premium as instrumental for the reproduction of post-colonial hierarchies between management and workers, an interviewed Sri Lankan labor rights activist explicitly suggests this. Referring to the common use of the premium for loans, he points out that: ‘This creates dependence from the estate management. Critical people won't utter a word against the person to whom they have to repay their debt’. The use of loans to discipline labor has antecedents in a system of advances that was part of the colonial recruitment and governance of workers in South Asian plantations (Gupta 1992, 188–189).

Taken together, these observations highlight the role of both material and discursive practices in shaping workers’ experience of Fairtrade. They show that workers experience and appreciate premium investments as the most tangible benefits of certification. Yet, these benefits are constructed as the consequences of workers’ effort to produce quality tea rather than as the result of management's social compliance. Practices of and discourses transmitted by the FPC in which management holds a powerful position come out as crucial in producing this understanding.

Burawoy's labor process theory does not foreground this discursive dimension of workers’ experience. Written before the poststructuralist turn in labor process studies, his theory underlines how the material organization of production influences the values prevailing at the shop floor (Burawoy 1979, 85). In South Asian tea plantations, in contrast, the meanings given to Fairtrade in discourses conveyed by the FPC, in particular, come out as a powerful tool for labor governance. The blurred boundary between FPC and management invisibilizes the role of the management in shaping an understanding of Fairtrade that serves its own interest. This distorted ‘Fairtrade theory of change’ is summarized by the FPC member quoted above: ‘[W]e feel that if we work more, we get more [premium] funds’. Paralleling governmentality approaches to neoliberalization, which trace discursive and non-discursive practices that shape subject (re)formations in line with contemporary forms of market rule, this understanding of Fairtrade motivates workers to work harder to sell more quality tea to generate premium funds.

5.3. ‘After getting Fairtrade benefits, we get motivated to work’ – playing workplace games in the tea estate?

Besides such reframing of the Fairtrade logic, some of the premium investments directly reward higher productivity through plucking incentives and attendance bonuses.

A Sri Lankan plucker shares that for harvesting more tea leaves than the daily target, besides the incentive wage that the CBA stipulates, she also receives a premium-funded saree as an in-kind incentive from the FPC. While this had been a common practice in other Sri Lankan estates, it seems this was discontinued there because workers considered it discriminatory. A plucker complains:

They gave sarees for the women who pluck more, but this is not good. We feel bad about it. All of us are working hard, they should give [it to] everyone, so we will get motivated and want to work more.

In contrast to such selective rewards for pluckers’ productivity, attendance bonuses are widely used to motivate workers. Workers receive a bonus if they appear a minimum number of days for work. Albeit based on consent rather than operating through coercive means, this tool bears resemblance to the colonial logic of keeping the costs of plantation labor low by not allowing labor markets to develop (Behal and Mohapatra 1992, 143).

Using the Fairtrade Premium to fund these bonuses enables several South Indian estates to address labor scarcity. As a result, the number of beneficiaries as well as the amount of the bonus is significantly higher in South Indian tea plantations compared to those in Assam. In South Indian estates, additional annual amounts of Indian Rupees (INR) 5,000 or 10,000 are paid for a minimal attendance of 240 days per year. In Assam, in contrast, the 2015 CBA stipulates the topping of the daily base wage by merely one extra rupee if workers appear for five days in a stretch (ACMS 2015).

In the context of the prevailing poverty wages, the provision of even small benefits motivates this male field worker on an estate in Assam:

We get better wages if we go out for doing work in the MGNREGS and food security related works. However, we also know that we have to work regularly [in the estate] to avoid the losses due to absenteeism of workers for which we are trying to motivate all the workers. Now, we also feel that after the workers started getting the Fairtrade benefits, we get motivated to work and reduce the problems due to absenteeism at work.

His attitude is ambiguous. After highlighting the attractiveness of alternatives to plantation employment, he underscores that Fairtrade benefits motivate him to show up for work in the tea estate. In addition, it seems these uses of the Fairtrade Premium have increased his identification with the management's perspective. He now sympathizes with the problems that workers’ absence poses for management and perceives losses for the estate as undesirable for workers, too.

The attendance bonus serves different functions for female and male plantation workers. Male workers face employment alternatives outside the plantation, even though caste- and ethnicity-based discrimination form hurdles in accessing urban jobs opportunities (e.g. Bhowmik 2011, 245). Such alternatives are hardly available to their female colleagues due to their longer working hours in the estate and the home. This may explain why, in Assam, only male survey participants report to benefit from the attendance bonus.

The attendance bonus seems to achieve its objective. Managers establish an explicit connection between certification and workers’ presence. Asked about the changes that Fairtrade certification has brought about, one South Indian estate manager states: ‘There is less absenteeism. – Interviewer: What are the reasons for that? – Manager: […] Fairtrade benefits encourage presence’. What remains unstated here as well as in the mechanisms outlined above is that this impact of the Fairtrade Premium – guaranteeing a steady supply of committed labor – is the plantation company's rather than Fairtrade's design.

Women workers, in contrast, describe the bonus as a general incentive for greater effort. A plucker in South India soberly summarizes this logic: ‘They said, workers get 5,000 rupees if you work hard. To get the amount, we work hard’. Here, the discursive framing of Fairtrade as a reward for tea plantation workers’ effort jointly with the material premium benefits induce higher productivity.

At first sight, the effects of incentive wages paid to field workers in South Asian tea plantations resemble the game of ‘making out’ for Burawoy's colleague operators who compete for incentive pay while simultaneously increasing their company's profit. Referring to tea pluckers in Assam, Sharma (2016, 212) points out that ‘[…] the very term and idea of an incentive wage revealed the capitalist strategies of planters to extract surplus value from the workers by cultivating a spirit of competition and enticing them to earn more than their fellow workers’. Read from this perspective, Fairtrade certification may offer a ‘carrot’ to stimulate productivity-enhancing workplace games in the tea estate.

A closer look complicates the straight line from the US engineering company to South Asian tea gardens. For instance, if Sri Lankan tea pluckers were bought into the plantation company's pursuit of profit by playing the competitive incentive wage game why would they reject premium-funded sarees as rewards for high yields?

I argue that plantation workers’ curtailed choice prevents the easy travel of the masculine game of making out from the engineering shopfloor to the tea harvest in South Asia. Burawoy (1979, 27) identifies the organization of the labor process in a way that presents workers with choices as the basis for ‘manufacturing consent’. In contrast to the industrial workers whose experience Burawoy analyses and whose basic needs are assured, workers in South Asian tea plantations experience severe poverty. How much choice do they have to engage in incentive-based work that tops up their meager wage? A sequel to the colonial instrumentalization of the ‘dull compulsion of economic forces’ (Brass and Bernstein 1992, 6) for labor governance, working harder and for longer hours becomes a necessity to make ends meet rather than a game.

Besides poverty, gender norms limit the organization of consent to increased work intensity through workplace games in South Asian tea plantations. Gendered social norms circumscribe pluckers’ choice, in particular. On the one hand, the Tamil women harvesting tea on Sri Lankan plantations consider rewards for individual performance inappropriate in a context where competitiveness is not appreciated as an expression of femininity. Here, in contrast to what Burawoy (1979, 148, 156) found among male industrial workers, tea pluckers’ social roles scripted by patriarchal gender norms do mediate their work experience. More importantly, the same norms allocate responsibility for care and household chores to women on top of their longer working hours in the estate. As a result, women workers are left with no time to look for other sources of income. A plucker in an estate in Assam expresses this vividly:

Sir, frankly speaking, we don't even find time to think about our personal life while working in the garden. We are always engaged in one work or the other. We don't get leisure time to enjoy or think about improving the facilities in the workplace.

While Burawoy (1979) insists on embedding production relations into the wider organization of capitalist societies, in practice, Manufacturing consent narrowly focuses on the workplace. Critics have pointed out that by foregrounding class, Burawoy's account pays too little attention to workers’ other identities, especially with regards to their gendered roles (Davies 1990, 402; Erdogan 2016, 70; Payne 2018, 375).

An intersectional perspective that sees the workplace as a site where gender is reproduced reveals that class relations at the level of the estate are intertwined with gendered power hierarchies that extend into workers’ wider social lives. Kurian and Jayawardena (2017, 28) denote this as ‘plantation patriarchy’, an ‘[…] overall system of controls on women workers, incorporated in the labor regime and in the organization of plantations, and supported by the wider society’. The concept also implies the integration of working and living conditions in the enclave economy of tea plantations, an important factor that distinguishes the tea estate from the industrial shopfloor. The fact that the religious devaluation of women's lives, their position at the bottom rung of the plantation system's class, caste, and racial hierarchy are braided together here has led feminist scholars to apply the notion of ‘multiple and overlapping patriarchies’ (Kurian and Jayawardena 2017, 28).

These intersecting controls shape a docile and productive workforce. Under male authority in the tea plantation and in their households, women are culturally supposed to take care of the needs of the different males in their environment (Kurian and Jayawardena 2017, 37). As shown in section 2, such gendered expectations have been instrumental for labor control and value extraction. Hence, given the coercive power of these interlocked constraints, harvesting women workers’ consent seems less required: Jointly with the disciplining force of poverty, the gendered social pressures they face guarantee pluckers’ steady and increasing effort in the tea leaf harvest.

Male plantation workers, in contrast, face choices that can be organized into consent to profit-making. Whereas they are affected by the same material poverty, they do not experience a similar time squeeze as female workers. Thus, they both have more time at their hand for livelihood diversification and face employment alternatives outside the estate. In the context of labor scarcity faced by South Asian estates, the management therefore needs to offer incentives for male workers to make their labor available to the estate. The discussion above suggests that the use of premium funds as an attendance bonus provides this motivation.

The premium benefits used to present tea estate workers with choice also shape their interest in the labor process. As explained above, the attendance bonus helps to align male workers’ and management's interest in reducing absenteeism. A male field worker and FPC member in South India echoes the examples presented above. Commenting on the effects of the attendance bonus, he asks rhetorically: ‘Suppose, if we sit at home idly, how will the estate perform its activities?’. Reflecting Burawoy (1979, 29), he consents to profit accumulation as he regards his livelihood as dependent on the thriving of his employer's business.

5.4. ‘They work faster and the company is benefited’ – aligning workers’ interests with management's through training

Alongside premium investments, workers’ training plays an important role in foregrounding win-win situations for workers and management. The Fairtrade Standard specifies labor legislation and negotiation skills as relevant topics for trade union representatives’ capacity development, whereas, for FPC members, these key areas include project and financial management skills. Other topics comprise of skills for women's empowerment, equity as well as occupational safety and health (OSH) (Fairtrade International 2014, 15–18, 35).

The training that research participants spoke of had a narrower focus. Training on OSH was most commonly mentioned in Fairtrade-certified plantations, especially in Sri Lanka (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Most commonly mentioned types of training in Fairtrade-certified estates.
Note: The figures refer to the number of times that trainings were mentioned in the Fairtrade context.

The OSH trainings offered foreground shared interests of workers and management. A Sri Lankan manager gives examples:

One person died of lighting a few years back, and we have to pay a million as compensation. Another person fell and this person's hand went into the machine, so the company has to bear losses. Now, we have regular occupational safety training and the workers are more aware and we prevent and protect them from these incidents. The workers also feel comfortable. We also give a skill training program and they work faster and the company benefits. When we do this, the people are happy and people work with happiness and they benefit.

He highlights that training on OSH saves the management money for compensation and lost productivity. Greater safety and productivity, in turn, motivates workers. This win-win situation may also explain Fairtrade's contribution to advancing OSH in other industries that earlier studies identified. Hence, besides these material benefits, trainings on OSH act as a catalytic tool to advance convergence between management's and workers’ interests.

Last but not least, trainings also directly support the link laid between Fairtrade certification and tea quality. This is illustrated by this statement of a male FPC member and OSH officer in Assam:

Following Fairtrade certification, the workers and members have started giving importance to maintain cleanliness inside the factory. Now, the factory workers are more concerned about maintaining cleanliness inside the factory for quality tea output. The management has provided soaps, masks, dresses to the workers to use during work. These articles help to motivate the workers to increase the tea production.

The officer's statement parallels the stance of a Darjeeling plantation owner that Besky (2014, 171) describes. He judges his tea factory's cleanliness as a mirror of the estate's tea quality. Here, too, Fairtrade enters the scene as an actor rewarding the quality of the final product rather than the fairness of its production process.

Whether motivating greater effort or increased attention to quality output, the common thread that runs through these experiences is that Fairtrade trainings shape a shared interest in higher productivity among workers and management. Despite the erosion of regulated base wages through the increasing role of productivity incentives, the necessity for management to elicit workers’ cooperation is rooted in especially male workers’ improved access to employment opportunities outside the estate that strengthen their bargaining power. Besides, declines in tea auction prices have increased the need to gain workers’ consent to the management's pursuit of profit.

Managers endorse this reading of a catalytic role of Fairtrade for the convergence of management's and workers’ interests. They confirm that better treatment of workers in line with the Fairtrade Standard motivates presence, increases productivity, and reduces costs. Mirroring the subtle celebration of a Darjeeling plantation owner's ability to quell agitating Nepali nationalists among the workforce through Fairtrade in Sen (2017, 97), contentedly, a Sri Lankan manager concludes: ‘Barely, you see a Fairtrade garden go on strike’.

6. Conclusion and outlook

Reading South Asian tea plantation workers’ experience of Fairtrade through the lens of labor process theory brings to the fore that transnational labor governance through certification provides tea plantation companies with tools to ‘harvest workers’ consent’ to profit accumulation. These devices include a narrow framing of Fairtrade as premium investments and the use of premium-funded benefits and trainings to align workers’ interests with management's aim to raise productivity. The tools that Fairtrade provides for labor governance incentivize increased labor intensity as well as greater attention to product quality. They work both on the discursive environment and on the material experience of tea plantation workers’ relations in production.

The application and interrogation of Burawoy’s (1979) analytical perspective in the context of South Asian tea plantations reinforces earlier calls to embed labor process analysis of workplace relations in their wider social environment. In contrast to the independence of workers’ experience at work from their ‘external’ social roles that Burawoy (1979, 156) finds, social identities continue to shape labor governance and conditions at work in the global tea value chain. Foregrounding the intersection of gender and class, I show how the persistent ‘plantation patriarchy’ in South Asian tea estates creates a powerful tool to guarantee and increase women workers’ effort in the tea leaf harvest. This reminds us that social identities, such as gender, but also ethnicity and caste, are not merely cultural add-ons to economic structures, but integral to the tea value chain's political economy. Wedding labor process theory with insights into the South Asian gender order this way, a more nuanced image of the interplay of ‘carrots’ to harvest workers’ consent – such as Fairtrade Premium investments – and coercive ‘sticks’ or ‘social structures of accumulation’ (Harriss-White 2003) that ensure workers’ effort comes to the fore. This more fine-grained, intersectional view calls into question the assumption of a clear-cut distinction between labor governance through coercion or consent, suggesting varying degrees of labor unfreedoms that emerge from the subordination of the plantation workforce through the use of both economic and social powers since colonial times (Gupta 1992, 190; Jegathesan 2019, 13).

The logic that underpins these processes differs starkly from Fairtrade's theory of change. Paralleling Dolan (2008, 316), whose study of certified tea in Kenya reveals how Fairtrade's emancipatory discourse involves both the capacity to liberate and to dominate, this transnational mechanism designed to counter plantation workers’ marginalization in unequal relations of class and North–South trade locally also serves as a tool to increase tea plantations’ productivity. This goes beyond LeBaron’s (2018) observation that certification does not challenge a model of GVC governance that minimizes labor costs through tea plantation workers’ underpayment. Rather, Fairtrade certification is translated into practices that become part and parcel of this business model. Perpetuating historical efforts to increase tea plantations’ productivity through work intensification, this way, Fairtrade feeds into the localized particularities of neoliberal development.

The compatibility of Fairtrade with neoliberal capitalism has been pinpointed before. Fridell (2014), for instance, identifies ‘fair trade fantasies’ as a ‘narcissistic affirmation of the exaggerated power of Northern consumers’ (Fridell 2014, 1180). More specifically, West (2010, 713–715) points to the hazard that fair trade marketing satisfies consumers’ desire for greater social justice by reproducing stereotypical images of producers as poor and primitive others. Reinecke (2010, 578) argues that, Fairtrade pricing embedded in a competitive market might be accused to help ‘[…] the capitalist market to incorporate the critique that was meant to destabilize it’. Jaffee (2012) traces how, in contrast to fair trade's ambition to create alternative, shorter commodity chains that free up capital to be redistributed to producers in the form of a higher, fairer price, ‘[…] the involvement of large corporate firms in the fair trade market has led to the certification of precisely the kind of longer, captive chains that the system was formed to counteract’.

Zooming in on the usability of Fairtrade certification in the first link of the global tea chain, this article bring to the fore a paradox: At the level of the estate, certification contributes to reinforcing clientelist class relations that are embedded in a wider system of ‘plantation patriarchy’, while questions of the persistently skewed value distribution between Northern retailers and Southern tea producers that have led to the emergence of fair trade in the first place are bracketed.

Besides rendering this visible, Burawoy's lens also sensitizes to a potential prisoners’ dilemma. Productivity incentives are crucial for supplementing workers’ meager earnings and for boosting individual estate's output. Yet, mirroring Fridell’s (2014, 1189) caution in the context of the global coffee chain, while guaranteeing cheap supply of tea to the global market, high productivity might contribute to oversupply of tea, threatening auction prices and hence undermining plantation companies’ profitability. This sheds light on the wider political economy of the tea value chain and implies, to paraphrase Burawoy (1979, 93), that tea plantation workers may indeed ‘make history, but not as they please’.

Against the backdrop of these sobering findings, is it at all possible to identify steps towards a situation in which Fairtrade plays a positive role for tea plantation workers’ empowerment? My analysis has demonstrated that the separation of Fairtrade from labor rights-related discourses, practices and actors has been key to enable the management to instrumentalize certification for accumulation strategies in the tea value chain rather than challenging them. This simultaneously points to a potential lever to use Fairtrade certification as a ‘launching pad for critical counterpolitics’ (Sen and Majumder 2011, 31) that truly challenges national and transnational political economic relationships. This contrasts with the prevailing management-mediated system of tea plantation certification in South Asia in which the ‘[…] empowerment of workers has to be within the management's tolerance level’ (Makita 2012, 106). Labor organizations’ active and critical participation in the certification process could contribute to awareness-raising among workers about their rights and Fairtrade's commitment to supporting these. This way, Fairtrade could also contribute to a process of union renewal that is direly needed in both India and Sri Lanka.

Notes

Following Raynolds (2017, 1487), in this article, ‘Fairtrade’ denotes the certification system governed by Fairtrade International, while ‘fair trade’ refers to multiple initiatives pursuing a common vision.

While tea is also produced in other South Asian countries, such as Bangladesh and Nepal, given the concentration of South Asian tea plantations in India and Sri Lanka and the focus of the present empirical analysis, in the following, ‘South Asia’ and related terms refer to these two countries.

Acknowledgements

This article would have been impossible without the insightful and enjoyable collaboration with the other members of the research team (in alphabetical order): Sajitha Ananthakrishnan, Karin Fernando, K.J. Joseph, Romeshun Kulasabanathan, Rachel Kurian, Vimal Raj, Shasikala Samuel, Namrata Thapa and P.K. Viswanathan. I am grateful to Rachel Kurian, Laura T. Raynolds and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article that have helped me to sharpen my argument. All remaining shortcomings are solely mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

The research underlying this article was supported by Fairtrade International.

Notes on contributor

Karin Astrid Siegmann works as Associate Professor in Labour and Gender Economics at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands. Holding a PhD in agricultural economics, her research has been concerned with how precarious work is fashioned at the intersection of global economic processes with local labor markets, stratified by gender and other social identities.

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Notes

Harvesting consent: South Asian tea plantation workers’ experience of Fairtrade certification

Abstract

1. Introduction

2. Labor governance in the tea value chain

3. Manufacturing consent through workplace ‘games’

4. Methodology

5. How Fairtrade helps harvesting tea plantation workers’ consent

5.1. ‘If we work more, we get more funds’ – certifying workers’ commitment rather than management compliance

5.2. ‘People won't utter a word against those to whom they are indebted’ – using premium funds for labor governance

5.3. ‘After getting Fairtrade benefits, we get motivated to work’ – playing workplace games in the tea estate?

5.4. ‘They work faster and the company is benefited’ – aligning workers’ interests with management's through training

6. Conclusion and outlook

Notes

Acknowledgements

Disclosure statement

Funding

Notes on contributor

References

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