Plantation Labour Research Articles

"Green Hills And Golden Brews: The Tea Profile Of Kerala"

The plantation sector in Kerala, encompassing key crops like tea, coffee, and rubber, faces significant challenges that threaten its economic viability and the livelihoods of workers. High production costs, coupled with fluctuating market prices, have positioned Kerala as one of the highest-cost producers of plantation commodities in India. The cost of producing tea has escalated dramatically over the years, severely impacting profitability and leading to financial instability for many growers. Additionally, climate change has introduced further complications, resulting in unpredictable weather patterns, increased pest infestations, and damage to plantation infrastructure. These factors have not only diminished productivity but have also jeopardized the sustainability of the entire sector. To address these issues, a multifaceted approach is necessary. Implementing a support price mechanism can stabilize incomes for growers, while crop diversification can enhance revenue generation and reduce dependency on a single crop. Moreover, investing in skill development programs tailored to the needs of the plantation workforce is vital, enabling workers to adapt to value-added production processes. Strengthening worker welfare through the enforcement of the Plantation Labour Act and improving access to education and healthcare in remote plantation areas are also crucial. Collaborative efforts between government entities and plantation stakeholders can lead to enhanced infrastructure, better access to technology, and educational opportunities, ensuring a resilient and sustainable plantation sector that benefits both producers and local communities alike. By prioritizing these strategies, the plantation industry in Kerala can navigate its current challenges and pave the way for a more sustainable and prosperous future

Cultivating Pacific Cocoa: Chinese Plantation Labor in Colonial Era Samoa and Vanuatu

Abstract From the 1890s to the 1930s the cocoa plantations of the southwest Pacific relied on Pacific Islander and Asian indentured labor from China and Vietnam. In Samoa and the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) white planters lobbied colonial administrations for permission to introduce Chinese under contract as indentured labor, a coercive and controversial labor system. This article points to the role of transimperial economic competition in encouraging the use of indentured labor, traversing German, French, and British colonial administrations in the Pacific. Cocoa cultivation, white planters argued, required more regular attention compared with sugar or copra, and Chinese indentured workers were deemed the most suitable to meet these requirements. Australian, New Zealand and British administrators in the Pacific, who were keenly aware of ongoing French indenture practices, lobbied to introduce and retain indentured labor. Without the perceived competitive edge of indentured labor, cocoa cultivation was considered unlikely to prosper. It was not until the mid-1930s that recruitment of Chinese indentured labor ended. It came at a time of international and Chinese calls for abolition of coerced labor but was also driven by anti-immigration and pro-white nationalist sentiments. Even after recruitment ceased, the New Zealand administration in Samoa obliged Chinese workers to remain on the cocoa plantations. While the French did repatriate Chinese recruits, they retained Vietnamese workers. Only after 1945 were indentured workers freed from the obligation to cultivate cocoa, and finally permitted to abandon the plantations.

The plantation system and the roots of the southern rural mortality penalty in the northern Blackland Prairies of Texas

In recent decades, public health researchers have observed that the health of rural people has declined relative to the health of urban people in the United States. This disparity in health and life expectancy across the rural/urban divide has been described as the Rural Mortality Penalty. However, public health researchers have also noted that health and life expectancies are not uniform across the rural United States, but vary according to race, sex, gender, and other factors. Rural health disparities also vary geospatially and are especially pronounced in the American South, leading to recent calls for greater attention to the structural factors that shape the health of rural Southerners. In this study, we take an anthropological and historically explicit approach to study the impacts of systemic violence on rural health. Specifically, we focus on farm labor within the plantation system as a context where geospatial, racial, and sexual differences in mortality, often studied in isolation, find a common historical source. Here we analyze vital records data from the post-emancipation period in the Blackland Prairies ecoregion of Texas, a period when emerging forms of plantation labor such as tenant farming, convict leasing, and migrant labor were being developed to maintain the plantation economy after the abolishment of chattel slavery. We find that the plantation system remains a strong predictor of differential mortalities in rural Texas, accounting for nearly all the variation that exists across the rural/urban divide and elucidating the complex interactions of race, sex, labor, and health in the rural South.

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

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.

HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AGAINST OIL PALM PLANTATION WORKERS IN WEST KALIMANTAN REGION

<p>Indonesia, a leading palm oil producer, faces a dilemma between the palm oil sector's positive economic contribution and its negative impact on labor rights. Despite creating jobs and economic growth, the sector is often associated with rights violations such as corruption, job insecurity, low wages, forced labor, occupational safety, child labor, and social security. Case studies in West Kalimantan and Central Sulawesi highlight the issues that need to be addressed to strike a balance between economic development and human rights protection in Indonesia's palm oil sector.</p><p> </p><p>Keywords: Human Rights, Plantation Labor, Oil Palm, Worker</p>

Competing Choreographies of the Postcolonial Plantation: Planter’s Pageantry Meets Sistren Collective’s Sweet Sugar Rage

This essay examines the 1985 documentary film, Sweet Sugar Rage (co-directed by Honor Ford-Smith and Harclyde Walcott), and its methodologies of renewable resistance to the enduring choreographies of planter's pageantry in the postcolonial Caribbean. Produced by Jamaica's Sistren Theatre Collective – a radical community theatre group formed in 1977 – the film (the collective's first) documents a set of dramatic interventions focused on women's labour exploitation in Jamaica's sugar cane fields. A series of workshops and plays depicts the historical and current material conditions of cane workers and aims to support participants in the practical navigation of plantation labour. In staging the material conditions of post-independence Jamaican plantation labour, including the gendered hierarchies of union organising, these counter-choreographies of workers' solidarity re-occupy the cane field as a historically dense site of collective resistance. Furthermore, I argue, in their rejection of the ubiquitous and insidious staging of the plantation as an ahistorical, hyper-aestheticised dreamscape of leisure and play, these local counter-choreographies intervene on the scale of global history. The essay articulates the stakes of this refusal by historicising the installation of plantation heritage tourism as a nostalgic site of planter's pageantry that continues to erase the violent legacies of enslaved and indentured labour into the present day. Engaging the aesthetic and political consequences of these competing choreographies, the essay looks towards the future of the Caribbean as a global proscenium of postcolonial possibility.

Cocoa at Work: Materials and Labor in the Making of Global Chocolate

Abstract This article examines two distant workspaces of cocoa: plantations in São Tomé, a small Portuguese colonial island in the African Gulf of Guinea, and a British chocolate factory. In line with commodity-centered histories, it focuses on the diversity of labor systems, with different levels of coercion, working simultaneously to make cocoa and chocolate available to consumers in the industrial cities of Europe and North America. But this article adds to that literature by embracing the challenge of thinking with materials and the ways they produced specific social worlds. Cocoa and chocolate are understood as “thick things” whose physical attributes allowed or restricted different operations and uses and whose characteristics promoted or obstructed particular labor forms and allowed for the stabilization of different modes of rule. When we take the material properties of cocoa seriously, it is possible to see how mass chocolate production was a technological and scientific enterprise conceived to cope with the constraints of cocoa itself, with profound consequences for the labor forms on the plantation and the factory. Materials bound plantation laborers and chocolate scientists to specific technological, economic and political relations and demanded huge investments and much labor to create alternative ones.

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)

Disabling labour: race, disability and Indian indentured labour on Fijian sugar plantations, 1879–1920

ABSTRACT The establishment in the1830s of the Indian indentured labour system as a cheap labour source for British sugar plantations provoked criticism from parliamentarians, missionaries and labour advocates who considered indenture the reintroduction of slavery by another name. Like slavery, the indenture system bonded into labour non-white, poor and unfree workers, already subordinated within the British empire. Like slavery, the Indian indentured labour system was structurally disabling. The development of colonial racial typologies of the ideal labourer embedded race into notions of the able bodied worker. While being of a preferred racial type was a condition of fitness to work it also exposed labourers to the disabling circumstances of being unfree labour on sugar plantations. Indenture practised in Fiji from 1879 to 1917 reflects the disabling effects of racial and economic subordination even in the late indenture period when labour conditions had improved. The development of systematic government measures to select workers as fit for the regulation of plantation labour and the disabling impacts of injury, illness, sexual and mental trauma experienced on the plantation, qualify the notion that modern western ideas of disability emerge primarily from urban industrializing environments.

Health Infrastructure Gap in Tea Plantations of West Bengal

The deplorable living conditions of the workers, in spite of the industry's significance, led to the passage of the Plantation Labour Act 1951 (PLA-51) and subsequent Plantation Labour Rule in 1956 (WBPLR-56) in West Bengal. The rule aimed to improve the living conditions of the workers by providing certain benefits. Among them, providing health infrastructure for the workers in remote areas was the most significant. However, over two lakh daily-rated tea plantation workers in West Bengal faced uncertain living conditions caused by mainly inadequate educational and health infrastructure, along with other factors. The study seeks to demonstrate how different-sized tea estates implement WBPLR-56 differently. The study also examines the variations in the implementation of WBPLR-56 among the Dooars, Darjeeling Hills, and Terai tea-producing regions of West Bengal.

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)

Destitution and displacement: unveiling the precariousness of homelessness and statelessness among uphill country Tamil repatriates in India

ABSTRACT This article presents the conceptual framework of political and physical homelessness as embodiments of precarious homelessness, emanating from the palpable characteristics of housing. This physical housing doesn’t just provide shelter, it also gives people a sense of political identity and belonging to a home or country. The uphill Tamil community, coerced into migratory movements from India to Sri Lanka for plantation labor, confronted a formidable existence marked by precarious homelessness. This community nurtured a perception that the absence of their personal dwelling impeded a sense of belonging to the Sri Lankan nation. Even subsequent to acquiring Indian citizenship and repatriating, their precarious homelessness endured during their post-repatriation phase due to transient or inadequate housing conditions in India. This state of precarious homelessness begets housing insecurity and prolonged psychological adversities, encompassing apprehension, strain, and anguish among the Hill Country Tamils. By propounding this framework, the study not only enhances understanding of homelessness dynamics, but also provides scholars and policymakers with a holistic view to address homelessness among stateless and displaced populations.

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston

<i>The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World</i> by Katherine Johnston

THE EFFECT OF HOUSEWIVE INCOME CONTRIBUTION PALM OIL FARMING WORKERS IMPLEMENTATION OF FAMILY FUNCTIONS

This research aims to uncover the impact of the contribution of income by housewives working as palm oil plantation laborers on family income and to analyze the implementation of family functions by these housewives in Bukit Kerikil Village, Bengkalis Regency. The research method employed is quantitative research using a census sampling technique. Data was collected through questionnaires, observations, and documentation. The results of the study indicate that the contribution of housewives working as palm oil plantation laborers to family income is quite significant, with the majority of respondents contributing between 41% and 50% of the family's income. Despite the insufficient income of their husbands, these housewives work as palm oil plantation laborers to help meet the family's needs. The research also evaluates the implementation of family functions by these housewives. The results show that family functions, including religious, affectionate, protective, reproductive, socialization, and economic functions, are generally well-implemented. However, some respondents believe that the implementation of affection and economic functions in their families still needs improvement. In conclusion, housewives working as palm oil plantation laborers in Bukit Kerikil Village make a significant contribution to family income and can perform family functions well. Despite facing challenges in balancing work on the plantation and household responsibilities, their efforts to achieve family welfare are commendable.

PELATIHAN PEMBUATAN LAPORAN KEUANGAN UMKM DI DESA KUBAH SENTANG KECAMATAN PANTAI LABU

Kubah Sentang is one of the villages in Pantai Labu sub-district, Deli Serdang Regency, North Sumatra province, Indonesia. It consists of two hamlets, namely Hamlet I and Hamlet II. Kubah Sentang Village is directly adjacent to Kuala Namu Deli Serdang International Airport, Pematang Monastery Village, Durian Village and Pantai Labu Pekan Village. The majority of the people in Dome Sentang Village are generally fishermen, farmers and livestock and plantation laborers. But in the sentang dome itself there are UMKM or home industries that produce food such as ombus ombus and raden galoh which still need coaching both in terms of marketing and financial reports. The purpose of this community service is for training in making MSME financial reports at the Sentang Dome. The result of this service is that the people of Sentang Dome understand how to make simple financial reports and understand how to record income and expenses so that the cash books owned by MSMEs in Sentang Dome can be recorded neatly and easy to understand. Starting from recording transactions in the cash book to making journals and up to making simple financial reports consisting of profit and loss reports, reports on changes in capital and statements of financial position

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo–Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo–Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)

Ingesting indenture: Lydia Cabrera, yellow blindness, Chinese bodies, and the generation of Afro-Chinese religious knowledge

ABSTRACTThis article explores the ways that Afro-Cuban religious texts called libretas and recorded oral divination narratives create entryways for Asian, especially Chinese, deities in the practice of Afro-Cuban religions, specifically the Yorùbá-derived orisha religion known as Lucumí. Lydia Cabrera, a self-taught ethnographer of Afro-Cuban religions, is a pivotal interlocutor in the generation of Afro-Chinese knowledge, having conducted fieldwork with practitioners of both African and Asian descent in Cuba whose ancestors were taken to Cuba as enslaved and unfree plantation labourers. Cabrera’s many published volumes, as well as her archive posthumously housed at the University of Miami, are important sources of information for both religious scholars and practitioners. By examining the exemplary divinatory narrative of the orisha Shangó travelling to China, as documented by Cabrera, we can better understand the processes of enmeshing, recording, and sharing of African and Asian knowledge and worldviews occurring in Afro-Atlantic religious practices.

Interlocked: kinship, intimate precarity, and plantation labour in India

AbstractThis article examines the employment of kinship relations in sustaining the plantation economy and in perpetuating the precariousness of child labourers who later became temporary workers in the tea plantations of Kerala, South India. Kinship ties locked diverse workers into a moral obligation of care that could easily be manipulated by plantation management as a form of labour control. Plantation capitalism, therefore, sustained itself not only through overt forms of violence but also through manipulating the precarity of employment in relation to intimate forms of love, care, and obligation that were bound up with kinship ties. Kinship networks of different kinds need to be understood as integral to the plantation society and as occupying a fundamental place within the capitalist order of plantations. I observe that the entangled relationship between workers’ precarity and plantation capitalism can be understood only if we pay attention to what I call the intimate precarity produced by the employment of kinship networks within plantation capitalism.

Narrative Perspective and Imagined Space: Understanding Japanese-American Experience in Hawaii through Murayama’s Fiction

This paper contextualizes the intricate relationship between language, culture, and place in Milton Murayama’s All I am Asking for is My Body, underlining the dynamic of the Japanese-American diasporic experience in Hawaii. The econarratological analysis delves into the spatial representation and homodiegetic narration employed by Murayama to immerse readers in the plantation labor experience and the linguistic landscapes of Hawaii. The study examines the complex dynamics between Standard English and Hawaiian Creole English (HCE) in Murayama’s work, highlighting their role in shaping the cultural and linguistic identity of the characters. By employing immersive textual cues, such as vivid descriptive imagery and the strategic use of language styles, Murayama creates a mental model of narratives that accurately depicts the historicity of the Nikkei community, focusing on the plantation labor experience. This paper argues that the deliberate blending of Standard English and HCE in Murayama’s fiction enhances readers’ engagement and understanding of the Nikkei experience and contributes to broader discussions on language, culture, and identity within the context of diaspora literature.

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)