Should Plantation Workers Be Working At Poverty Level Wages ?
By Vijaya Kumar –January 17, 2016
Professor Vijaya Kumar
Special correspondents and bigwigs in the planation industry keep hammering at us that plantation workers in Sri Lankan are vastly overpaid, any increases in pay will be spent on liquor, no increase in pay is possible unless tied to productivity and that workers should agree to a new system where they will become contract workers. Should we believe them ?
What is conveniently forgotten is that when the plantations were placed under private management, the trade unions were given undertakings among others that 10% of the profit would be distributed among employees and a collective agreement would be facilitated with the management companies to ensure that workers are paid a reasonable wages. The 4 cts per cost of living index point allowance paid at that time to workers was removed at the insistence of the companies and a 15% wage increase from Rs. 61.84 to Rs 72.22 per day offered to workers. The mechanism for facilitating a collective agreement took four years to establish but regular negotiations have taken place since then. The present strategy of the companies of refusing to sign a collective agreement constitutes a betrayal of this undertaking and Minister Kiriella should be congratulated for asking the companies to get out if they cannot pay workers a living wage. The Government has a Golden share which allows it to do just that.
The plantations went through a very similar crisis in 1992 when the Iraq – Iran Gulf war, sanctions against Iraq and the break-up of the Soviet Union and the resulting hard currency problems lost us our main markets for tea. It was this crisis interpreted by interested parties as being due to the inefficiency of state management that led to private management of plantations. The “efficient” private management which was expected to transform the industry into profitability appears to have only one solution to estate problems, controlling worker pay. At every negotiation except that of 2013, the RPCs insisted that they could not afford to raise wages and any pay rise must be accompanied by an increase in productivity but they finally grudgingly settled the issue. The superiority of private sector management is clearly a myth.Read More