Tagged: wages
The Currency That Never Left the Garden
From about 1870 into the 1950s, tea gardens in Assam and Sylhet paid workers in tokens of brass, zinc and pressboard, many of them minted in Birmingham and Calcutta, that had no exchange value outside the garden.
Who Picks Assam: From Indenture to the Daily Wage
Assam's tea was built on a labour force the British carried in from central India under contracts a worker could be jailed for breaking. This is who grows and picks the cup, how they came to be in the valley, and what the work pays now.
The Rise of the Small Tea Grower
Most Assam tea today does not come from a colonial-era estate. It comes from a plot smaller than a football pitch, owned by a family who has never processed a single leaf of it. Here is who actually grows the tea, by weight and measure.
The Iron Assam's Own Cup Takes From Its Pickers
Peer-reviewed surveys put anemia in Assam's tea garden workforce as high as 88 to 100 percent. The diet is the main cause. The tannins in the tea they pick and brew strong are a real, measurable second one.
The Tea Garden Community
Who they are, how they came to the valley, what the law obliges a garden to give them, and the festival calendar the labour lines keep on their own terms.