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A Lecture on the Treatment on Tea Plantation Laborers

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Last Tuesday a group of students from our class attended a lecture on the Darjeeling Tea Plantations in India. The lecture opened up our eyes to the unfair treatment of the workers on these plantations. India is very famous for many unique and delicious foods and drinks. One of these is tea. In order to produce and sell tea for a profit, many workers are needed to pick the leaves off the plants to be made into tea. In order to hire workers, plantation owners needed to figure out their way of compensation and how to take care of these people. The plantation owners decided to create these labor lines which formed into small villages for the workers to live inside. Each worker was not paid anything for the work performed, but instead they were given a house to live in. These homes were nothing more than small huts. They had dirt floors and thin tin roofs. The houses were nothing special for these hard workers but ultimately they were there only homes. They became their form of private wealth and the only assets to these poor plantation owners’ names. It is sad to think that through all of the hard work of these people, the only thing they have for themselves are these tiny homes on the edges of the fields they slave in all day. According to some historians though, these workers were not tenants they just physically lived in the homes.

Throughout the years many laws in India have been passed in order to improve the lifestyle of the plantation workers in India. One specific law was the Factories Act of 1938 which gave each worker time off, regulated their working hours, and improved the general health and safety for all the workers. It also petitioned for their own plantation code for the workers. This helped give more rights to the workers. Another law was the Plantations Labor Act of 1951 which mandated quoting and forced the employer to provide and maintain healthy and livable spaces for the workers to reside, land for the workers, and materials for the laborers. This act helped improve the living situations of many of the workers.

The most important aspect of these plantation homes was that they conjoin things, people, and practices together. Another way of conjoining these houses and people was through marriage and inheritance. Marriage was a way for many women to enter the workforce. When a man and a woman get married the wife can take over her mother in laws plantation job. Usually when people stop working in the fields they are forced to give up their homes, but these retired women can still live in the house after their daughter in laws takes over their position. Inheritance is a shared relationship to material goods as they share the home and all of the belongings inside of it. Inheritance is infrastructure and infrastructure is inheritance. This lecture was very informing and helped me understand the improper treatment of the plantation workers.

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=indian+tea+plantation+homes&biw=1101&bih=661&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi5zLCsnpzMAhWHuIMKHQX8AmMQ_AUIBigB#tbm=isch&q=Darjeeling+tea+plantations&imgrc=ZBXUeb00uoa23M%3A

https://www.google.com/search?q=indian+tea+plantation+homes&biw=1101&bih=661&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi5zLCsnpzMAhWHuIMKHQX8AmMQ_AUIBigB#tbm=isch&q=Darjeeling+tea+plantations&imgrc=ZBXUeb00uoa23M%3A

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