This paper explores interactions between the Indian government's colonially inspired Plantations Labour Act and TransFair USA's fair trade standards. Although fair trade makes claims to universalistic notions of social justice and workers' empowerment, what “fairness” means and how it is experienced varies by locale. In this paper, I discuss how state laws and fair trade certification agencies complement and contradict each other on Darjeeling tea plantations. I argue that by reinforcing neoliberal logic, fair trade undermines the state, which has maintained the responsibility of regulating the treatment of workers on plantations. Certification often leads to the dissolution of unions, which are regarded as a barrier to trade.
On tea plantations in Darjeeling, India, a house comes with every job. These domestic spaces constitute a significant portion of workers’ compensation. Jobs—and the houses that come with them—are inherited by successive generations of workers, but houses remain the property of plantations. Archival and ethnographic stories about the provision, inheritance, and upkeep of houses bring attention to the continued importance of “fixity” to capitalist regimes of accumulation. Fixity has three dimensions: a persistent association between ethnicity, place, and work; the fostering of senses of belonging through systems of inheritance; and the routine maintenance of infrastructures, including housing. As a theoretical and descriptive tool, fixity highlights a tension in late capitalism between work and life, and between freedom and bondage. [colonialism, gender, commodities, agriculture, work, Himalayas, West Bengal]
A debate has arisen in the fair trade community regarding the certification of plantation crops. On one side of this debate is Fair Trade USA, which supports plantation certification. On the other is the retailer Equal Exchange, whose leaders fear that fair trade's longstanding commitment to small farmer cooperatives may be in jeopardy. Drawing on the two organizations' experiences with tea plantations and cooperatives in Darjeeling, India, as well as my own ethnographic research, I explore how advocates in the global North identify who counts as a legitimate laboring subject of agricultural justice. This debate underscores that social justice in global agriculture is fundamentally multiple-in Nancy Fraser's terms, "abnormal". The seeming intractability of this debate shows that while the agricultural justice movement has attended to questions of economic distribution and cultural recognition, it must do more to address problems of political representation at national and international scales.
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