Women reinforce the struggle in the aftermath of Indian tea crisis
In a meeting held in Calcutta 1-3 June, forty representatives from IUF affiliated unions in the tea sector met to review the situation of the victims of unscrupulous employers.
Following the tea crisis in India that started in 2001, hundreds of thousands of workers, mainly women, have lost their jobs. Employers have disappeared over night and with them unpaid salaries and provident funds.
A report analysing data from 2003-2006 on the conditions of tea plantation workers in the north of Bengal (see web article of April 2006) revealed that more than 700 workers had died from malnutrition.
Anuradha Talwar, president of PBKMS and one of the authors of the report, called upon the Bengal government to urgently address the situation. Consequently the state government included the workers' families in food and medical care schemes.
To ensure that the affected tea workers get access to these schemes, a Workers Facilitation Centre has been established as a pilot with the help of PBKMS. In the five tea gardens covered by the Centre, mortality from starvation has ceased and all workers have been registered for new jobs after an educational programme.
In January 2006, the IUF decided to lodge a lawsuit to recover unpaid wages and provident fund payments. Unions in the All India Tea Workers Co-ordination Committee were invited to join the case. To date 5 unions have joined. The Supreme Court accepted this Public Interest Litigation case but no date has as yet been set for the hearing.
In line with the decisions of the IUF congress to implement actively IUF policy of women's participation, unions attending the June review meeting were told IUF would only support participation of two delegates if at least one was a women. This proved highly successful and the meeting had the highest percentage of women's participants to date. The meeting concluded that new approaches were needed in order to accelerate the struggle for the tea workers rights. An important aspect is the empowerment of women workers: to involve the women concerned more directly in union activities and in decision making.
Women constitute 80% of the work force in tea plantations and nobody knows better than themselves the issues that affect their daily lives, such as health and safety conditions, access to food, drinking water supply, medical facilities, child care and schools.
The active participation of women is therefore necessary to make organizing more effective, concluded the IUF Indian co-ordinator for agriculture and plantations, Sujata Gothoskar.