The Public Versus Private Space: The Feminization of Work in Tea Plantation

Baruah, Juri

doi:10.1177/2455632718794570

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Plantation feminist ethnography offers thickly textured stories (Baruah, 2018;Chatterjee, 2001) that weave together the personal and socio-political lives of women workers into a common fabric. Thirty-nine qualitative in-depth interviews and 150 surveys based on purposive sampling were conducted wherein a preidentified group of single and unwed mothers in the tea gardens of Jalpaiguri District were identified by volunteers of CINI (Child in Need Institute), an NGO working with the District Administration and its very own Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) workers.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The political geographies of these tea gardens in turn underscore the micro-mechanisms of power inherent in labour practices of recruitment. Baruah (2018) observes how the distinct spatial organisation of the tea garden, with the factory and its particular territory, create a politics of difference regarding company and labour. Women's work, away from the factory is regarded as 'unskilled', contingent and thereby inferior, despite their critical and time-consuming roles in plucking and tipping.…”

Section: Permeable Carceral Spaces and Gendered Dependencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The discourse of gender, practically absent in labour conferences and tripartite negotiations (Baruah, 2018), must be resuscitated by recognising the exploits and hardships of women's private and public lives, that exist along a continuum rather than a binary.…”

Section: Permeable Carceral Spaces and Gendered Dependencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Gendered Harm and Social Abandonment: Stories of the Dooars Women Tea Garden Workers

Bhattacharya

2024

Journal of Social Inclusion Studies

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The Tea Tribes of the Dooars in West Bengal are of the numerically preponderant culturally and socially dispossessed Adivasi population of Chota Nagpur and make up 80% of the tea plantation labour force. These tribes especially its women who form around 60% of the labour pool in the Dooars, serve as crucial social capital for the sustenance and burgeoning of the plantation industry. The tribes exhibit localised and hybridised social customs that have historically been in a dialectic relationship with the culture of commerce that predominates a capitalist bureaucratic organisation. This acculturation and an unfortunate reign of neglect have given birth to distinctive social arrangements, with the article examining the curious social currents of lone motherhood and abandonment of women shaping the household and thereby the social reproduction cycle of the tea industry. By invoking a feminist methodology, qualitative in-depth interpretive interviews of lone mothers and deserted women have been conducted to understand their renditions of gendered neglect and subliminal violence, while attempting to discover their position in the communitas of the tea industry. The study was conducted in the district of Jalpaiguri, with a heavy concentration of the Scheduled Tribe (62%) of the Adivasi subgroup found in its 89 registered tea gardens. The ‘thick’ descriptions of women’s narratives reveal nuanced notions of gender and intimate partner abuse, that shine light on violence characterised by its distinctive low intensity and its latent and subliminal nature evinced in the breach of a social compact. The nature of mistreatment and abuse that they describe opens up conceptual chinks in existing feminist literature on violence while providing further avenues to deliberate upon them. Imperfect, yet partial access to education, social media and government outreach as tools of modernity are however stoking aspirations for social justice, ineffectively handled by poorly trained and gender unresponsive socio-legal and bureaucratic agents.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Permeable Carceral Spaces and Gendered Dependencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Gendered Harm and Social Abandonment: Stories of the Dooars Women Tea Garden Workers

Bhattacharya

2024

Journal of Social Inclusion Studies

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“…This has resulted in the lowest wage rate for tea plantation work in Assam compared to other states as well (Bhowmik, 2015b). Moreover, the tea plucking work demands intensive physical involvement, such as standing for the entire day for tea plucking and carrying heavy bags of tea to factories (Baruah, 2018); again, the condition of women workers in tea gardens further deteriorates with long-term contracts, low wages, poor conditions of living and, extremely high mortality on the journey to and while working in the gardens (Bhowmik, 2015a; Sen, 2002). The ignorance of management as well as the state resulted in poor education, sanitation and health conditions for women in tea gardens (Bosumatari and Goyari, 2013; Gogoi and Sumesh, 2023).…”

Section: Context Of the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adivasi women temporary workers in tea gardens and the Covid-19 pandemic

Barhoi,

Dayal

2023

EDI

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PurposeThe tea plantation industry is characterized by the large-scale deployment of cheap women laborers and gender-blind practices that make the social positions of women workers vulnerable. This paper considers women temporary workers in tea gardens to study the exacerbated impact of Covid-19 on their lives. The impact of the pandemic on marginal tea garden women laborers has not received enough attention from researchers; hence, the authors have studied the gendered implications of the pandemic on Adivasi temporary women workers in tea gardens in India. “Adivasi” is an umbrella term to refer to all indigenous tribes in India.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a qualitative study with 26 in-depth interviews with women temporary workers who identify themselves as Adivasis. For the discussion, the authors have mainly borrowed from intersectionality and subalternity literature.FindingsThe analysis explored the intersectional experiences of the women temporary workers (1) as members of Tea Tribes who are compelled to continue working at tea gardens as wage laborers, (2) job insecurities at work due to their temporary worker status, (3) disadvantages faced by women workers for their gender identity and (4) the gendered impact of the pandemic on their lives.Originality/valueThis study has explored the gendered impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of temporary women workers who belong to ethnic minority groups in the global south. The exploitation of labor rights in the tea industry during the pandemic has not been discussed enough by researchers earlier.

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Making tea, making ethnic minority women: Women’s labor, ethnicized femininity, and the Pu’er tea business in contemporary China

2024

Food, Culture & Society

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The Public Versus Private Space: The Feminization of Work in Tea Plantation

Cited by 3 publications

References 5 publications

Gendered Harm and Social Abandonment: Stories of the Dooars Women Tea Garden Workers

Gendered Harm and Social Abandonment: Stories of the Dooars Women Tea Garden Workers

Adivasi women temporary workers in tea gardens and the Covid-19 pandemic

Making tea, making ethnic minority women: Women’s labor, ethnicized femininity, and the Pu’er tea business in contemporary China

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