Tagged: wages
The Currency That Never Left the Garden
For close to a century Assam's tea gardens paid workers in coin they struck themselves, brass discs and pressboard chits that were wages inside the fence and worthless the moment you carried them past it.
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
Every cup of Assam passes through one workforce first. 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.