The article examines an extraordinary wildcat strike led by women tea workers against a giant tea plantation company and dominant trade unions in the south Indian tea belt of Munnar. It employs situational analysis to examine the larger processes that led to the strike, implications for the workers, and to the wider socio‐economic relations in the tea belt. It is argued here that in addition to the exploitative plantation production and the poor implementation of welfare measures, the strike was largely fuelled by and directed against union corruption and the breach by union leaders of egalitarian relations in the workers' society. At the end, the article calls for an understanding of local conceptions of inequality, injustice, and humiliation as forces that have the potency to initiate and intensify labour resistance under exploitative production relations.
The recent economic crisis in the Indian tea industry has led to the closure of many plantations and to the marginalization of the plantation workers. A critical analysis of the social processes that evolve out of the crisis-ridden plantations reveals otherwise hidden forces that condition continuing marginality of the workers. Accordingly, the major focus of the article is to identify and delineate the social processes that underpin the social reproduction of the plantation workers' alienation in the crisis context. This article suggests that the marginal position of the plantation workforce, both in India and elsewhere, needs to be understood as a phenomenon equally reinforced by the larger social processes of the region as much as by the economic processes specific to the plantation system.
This article examines the circumstances, in which the tasks performed by professional labour contractors may be passed on to worker-agents. It does so by critically engaging with the experience of migrant workers from the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand as they travel to work in the Peermade tea belt in the south Indian state of Kerala. Specifically, we identify shifts in economic and political contexts that have permitted these functions to pass from labour contractors to workers-agents and from a sardari (topdown) to a ristedari (kinship based) system. Outlining the functions of the labour contractor-as bridge, broker and buffer-the article details the complex processes and the series of negotiations that occur during the transition from labour contractor to worker-agent-led recruitment and the implications of this shift for labour relations in the production setting. We conclude by calling for further consideration of the 'workeragent' as a key emerging figure in understanding the contemporary transformations in the reproduction of footloose migrant labour, which may have larger ramifications for other contexts in South Asia and beyond.
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