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The dilemma: 2 tea workers using a singlehandheld cutting device – costing as little as $1,000 – can replace up to 40 traditional tea pluckers.
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Mechanical devices are improving. Today they contribute to keeping tea bags inexpensive and ensuring reliable and consistent production of lower grade broken leaf, ready to drink and iced teas and flavored blends.
Historically, the cost and quality of tea harvesting depended on the fingers of the pluckers, mostly women, who epitomize the tradition of “two leaves and a bud.” Today, fingers are increasingly being replaced by the cutting blades of machines. This embodies the priority of radically improving costs to compete and even survive in a price-intensive export market, with what is global weirding more than just warming producing increased drought, floods, disruption of seasonal harvests, pests, and soil damage.
Mechanization of harvesting transforms costs but also transforms the lives of entire communities. Workers in the field face a brutal irony: they earn so little that poverty governs just about every dimension of their life, but their wages and “inkind” non-cash housing, food allowances and varying degrees of medical and educational services are too expensive for growers to afford. The shortage of skilled workers is increasing, but not their pay and well being. Though they earn just $2-4 a day, between the World Bank’s widely used metric of extreme poverty and a basic living wage, they constitute a full 60% of production costs. If workers lose their jobs, they lose their entire income and often housing and are caught in the poverty trap. If they keep them. They remain trapped.
The alternative to labor – mechanization -- is easy to summarize: just two workers using a handheld gas- or battery-powered cutter device can replace as many as 40 traditional pluckers. Single worker mechanical shears alone improve output 10-20 fold, reducing labor costs from $0.14 to $.04 a kilo according to several surveys. The machines cost as little as $1,000. On large, flat fields, massive machines could easily chop a car fleet to leaf-size morsels. The detailed productivity improvement figures are not fully reliable and precise. It’s enough to summarize them as “a lot.”
The new dynamic is manual versus mechanized. In almost every country, the industry is highly regulated so the “versus” gets fought over in courts, politics, and strikes. More and more, constraints on mechanization are being removed and earnings eroded. Here are news headlines from 2019 through 2021: “Assam High Court Halts Tea Worker Wage [Increase].” “Twenty Plantation Companies Move to Courts Against Wage Increase of Estate Workers.” “Kanya Platers Prevail as Court Permits Mechanization.” Women Bear the Brunt as Mechanization Wipes out Tea Sector Jobs.”
A routine logical part of the cases made in support of mechanization is that any increase in wages threatens industry viability. Unilever argued in court that a 30% increase in basic wage was “not affordable.” A compliance report on one of India’s largest growers publicly published figures on its 25 estates that employ 90,000 workers with 300,000 members of their families living on them. The firm agreed in 2013 to make improvements in pay and living conditions but there was no progress three years later. The case was still under review in court suits and by regulators in 2019: still no progress. The company admits to its limited response being due to “the continued financial distress of the industry.” It has made a loss every year since 2015.
It’s easy to label the growers and estate owners as either hard-hearted or hard-headed. Here’s an example of their core problem, from an Oxfam report on Assam and West Bengal in India: from 2012-2018, labor rates grew at close to three times that of auction prices.
For tea drinkers, the impacts of mechanization are mostly in keeping tea bags inexpensive and ensuring reliable and consistent production of lower grade broken leaf, ready to drink and iced teas and flavored blends. It’s a method for basic tea: good enough, rather than best. For that, hand plucking, mountain elevations, superior soil and water management, and artisan craft are core to specialty tea. While this is a relatively small fraction of the total market, it is an area where at the other end of the supply chain, specialty tea sellers, mostly online, are what may be termed social entrepreneurs.
They work directly with individual tea gardens to help them get a better price and build a stronger management base for producing a superior quality tea. They foster collaborative groups such as villages, smallholder cooperatives, and family farms. A priority is to educate and inform consumers to make them more sensitive to the issues and be willing to pay a small premium for socially beneficial tea, as they do for organic and health supporting tea. There are too many such online sellers to list.
The poverty traps
Tea has always been associated with poverty, from the colonial enforced importation of indentured labor – a much softer term than serfdom or slavery – physical isolation today in remote areas with no alternate job opportunities and family dependence for (very) basic housing, sanitation, schooling, and health services on the estate manager, from whom women had to get permission to marry, for instance. The best gardens are much more professionally run but are increasingly focused on financing, pay, quotas, and technology that largely come at some loss to the field labor force. A late 2019 research report on the income of smallholders succinctly states: (1) that interventions to lift them out of poverty have failed, and (2) there is no business case to make the effort to do so.
Obviously, conditions have improved over the centuries but the social isolation and lack of rights of today are the direct inheritance of past practices. Assam provides many instances. The tea communities of jobholders and smallholders and their families plus seasonal contract workers amount to around 6.5 million, close to 20% of the state’s population. Most are members of just under 100 registered ethnic “tea tribes” – Bania, Dandasi, Malar, Talagar, and other small clusters, many with their own languages such as Kurmali, Saora, and Kui. One survey reported a 75% illiteracy rate. Ethnic violence is pervasive. In one major upheaval in late 2014, over 100 died and 300,000 were displaced in a retaliatory conflict between Advasis villagers and Bodos.
All these are structural, not situational. Financial realism and productivity priorities make poverty in almost every isolated tea plantation, village, and community just about inevitable. Industry consortia and NGOs are making a coordinated effort to improve the working conditions of tea communities. The Rainforest Alliance, UTZ, Ethical Tea Partnership, UNICEF-led Improving Lives Program consortium of leading global brands, and Fair Trade certified teas are noted examples. It must be acknowledged that they have had only marginal economic impact and minimal increase in customer awareness and response.
Wages are the key structural issue. The patterns are consistent across all tea growing nations, except Japan, where they are very high, as is the mechanization needed to offset them. They are captured in a 2018 comparative study of India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. In all three countries, average tea wages are “far below” other minimum wage jobs and the lowest in agriculture. Median earnings range from $66 to $95 a month. The gender gap is typically 40%.
China has officially classified 227 out of 832 counties as impoverished. In 30% of these, tea is the primary source of income. A total 60% of Malawi workers in Africa’s second largest tea producer earn less than the World Bank $2 marker of poverty. Many growers counter that in-kind benefits, especially housing, add significantly to this. The evidence, however, is that social benefits are the fastest and easiest to cut.
Absenteeism is high, around 30% in Darjeeling. Tea jobs on the plantations and the contract workers that comprise a large seasonal and migrant force are not attracting new among entrants. This is creating a shortage of skilled workers and communal knowledge base. It’s a lousy job.
A disturbing figure is that compliance with minimum wage laws is low. The percent of workers receiving the mandated hourly pay in Malawi is just 10-30%. Debt is yet another way workers have been locked in. All too typical is a Sri Lankan woman aged 38 who has worked on the same plantation since she was 15. She would change jobs if she could but her housing is provided by her employers. She earns $80 a month but receives just $33 in net cash. Food for herself and three children is $53, mainly bought on credit from the plantation store, Worker health depends heavily on work conditions, the quality of care provided by plantation clinics and strict adherence to safety regulations. Common problems are malnutrition which in Assam is around four times the national average, anemia and, for the males engaged in pesticide spraying, tuberculosis, and lung complications. Increased daily quotas for the same pay are an indirect way to control worker pay. They are typically 20 kilograms of plucked leaf.
The opportunities of mechanization
These are scattered but generalizable examples. There is not a single instance of basic win-win benefits for producers and for workers. That may be structurally impossible without large and unlikely price and market growth. Secondly, even if the main proposals were accepted by employers, they offer a ceiling that is still below a sustainable living income and at the bottom of every organized global business sector, including other areas of agriculture. Finally, and most consequentially, the economic case for mechanization is close to unanswerable.
The opportunity is substantial. Pay and conditions are accompanied by a growing labor shortage. Those can escape the job do so, with urbanization and mobility – pre-Covid at least – drawing the young away from the tea fields. Mechanization fills the gap and is in its early stages of expansion across crops. A major blockage is that machines are impractical today on the sleep slopes that mark the bulk of smallholder farms and most of the best tea varieties. For the flat fields that grow most of the low grade leaf for commodity tea bags, iced tea and cheap blends, the machine offers many advantages and the worker almost none.
The core issue for tea drinkers is does the increase in yield come at the expense of reduced quality. The consensus in research studies has been consistent: quality suffers. “Hand plucked” and “two leaves and a bud” signal selectivity and judgment. Mechanization has often meant that lowering the cutters even a quarter of an inch increases broken leaf, twigs, tougher fragments, and even dead pests. The machines don’t discriminate – as yet. The new generation of technology is changing this and many informal reports from growers and professional tasters rate quality as on a par with hand-harvested tea. That mainly applies to the commodity crop that is used in teabags and iced tea.
The long-term promise is artificial intelligence (AI), with machine vision, neural learning models, IoT sensors and laser guides. There is a lot of hype and hope here. Mass deployment of robotics remains years away. The moves from workers to machines won’t be instant. Capital costs, terrain and politics remain constraints. But the direction seems set and momentum increasing.
The c.e.o. of Dilmah, Dilhan Fernando, captured the issues in a much-cited claim he made in 2017: Robots will “no doubt” replace millions of workers in the tea industry with the shift coming within a few years. AI is likely to reach a level of expertise that supersedes that of workers. He accepts that the impact on the labor force will be immense and that he did not have the solutions yet “believes they are round the corner.” For workers, that corner may mark a steep plunge to even more poverty. Or it may signal the path to a viable new economic growth path.