Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work. Part VI Why a cup of tea shouldn't be anyone's cup of tea, Part 2.

Part I: With the nature and value of work in harmony, dignity in work no longer an ignominy.  Part I by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
Part II: Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work.  Part II by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
Part III: Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work.  Part III by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
Part IV: Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work.  Part IV by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
Part V: Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work. Part V Why a cup of tea shouldn't be anyone's cup of tea, Part 1. by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk

Comfort. Such a reassuring word. To each of us, it represents ambience, habits and rituals that soothe, calm and recharge. Mine is a cup of hot black tea with lemon. Nothing like the comfort of my hot lemon tea. Early in the morning, no one else awake, no one needs me. Just the ticking of the clock and the comforting, mellowing, soothing bliss of my tea. I'm certainly not alone in seeking the comfort of my daily cup of tea. Wikipedia says that after water, tea is drunk by more people world-wide than any other beverage.

Then why is this comfort denied those who grow and harvest the tea leaves? Purely wanton and avoidable, there is nothing inevitable about this denial. The unacceptably appalling conditions of tea plantation workers in India hide in plain sight. Owned by McLead Russel, the world's largest tea producer, much of the world's black tea comes from Indian tea plantations, many of them located in the North-eastern state of Assam.

As I wrote earlier, India's tea industry is governed by the Plantation Labour Act of 1951. This Act applies to any tea grower with >15 workers or operates a plantation of >5 acres (Page on teaboard.gov.in). On paper the Plantation Labour Act exudes acumen, compassion and foresight. After all it guarantees housing, toilets, water supply, recreational facilities, day care for children below 5 years of age, life insurance, medical insurance, sick leave, and educational facilities for plantation workers' children. In other words, the Act envisioned the Indian tea plantation to be a microcosm of an idealized welfare state.

In January 2014, Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute published a 109-page report of their two-year long investigation of Indian tea estates. Their report, Page on columbia.edu, uncovered a litany of problems that include endemic 'abusive' practices. Nothing trivial about the abuses. To the contrary, no running water, toilets that are nothing but holes in the ground, drinking water sources adjacent to said 'toilet' holes, the evidence and scale of abuse is all too graphic and undeniable.

Culture certainly plays its part in local management practices. Time-tested, ingrained prejudices, even frank bigotry certainly underlie the pathetic living conditions of these hapless tea estate workers. After all, what value human rights and laws enacted by parliaments when the people to whom they pertain are considered less-than-human by management? For e.g., p.26 of the report states, 'The separation and hierarchy are inscribed in the language of the plantation and all interactions between workers and management. Even when speaking to the research team, some APPL managers referred to the workers as if they were inferior humans, or even animals. At Achabam, after intervening in an unannounced visit, the management warned the team not to trust what workers said because they were 'just like cattle', unintelligent and prone to mob mentality (25).At Namroop, the plantation’s doctor said we had to understand that the workers had lower IQs (26). At Hathikuli, the General Manager and his wife matter-of-factly commented that their own children were 'completely alone', as if the the thousands of other families around them did not exist (27)'.
25 Interview with General Manager, Achabam Tea Estate, Assam, January 10, 2012.
26 Interview with clinic doctor, Namroop Tea Estate, Assam, April 17, 2012.
27 Interview with General Manager and wife, Hathikuli Tea Estate, Assam, April 19, 2012.

This report was published in 2014. What changed after it came out? Hope, desperate hope, drives the need for closure, for the righting of age-old wrongs. Yet, when in August-September 2015, BBC World News broadcast an investigative report on the scandalously atrocious living and working conditions of tea plantation workers in Assam, India, it was as if all this were being uncovered anew (The bitter story behind the UK's national drink - BBC News). Nothing surprising about McLeod Russel's response either, typical boilerplate caught-with-pants-down, Page on mcleodrussel.com.

Tea grown on these estates is sold worldwide by reputed brands such as Lipton, Tetley, PG Tips, etc. Even more egregious, it's certified 'ethical' by the Rainforest Alliance, an NGO, which now concedes 'the investigation has revealed flaws in its audit process' (The bitter story behind the UK's national drink - BBC News). Many of the products we buy and consume are proudly stamped with such certifications of sustainability, ethics or fair-trade. Yet, even cursory scrutiny of this certification process reveals it to be little more than rubber-stamping. Only the ignorant or foolish or uncaring could take them at face value.

I feel soul-crushing sorrow about the abuse that underlies my daily cup of tea. I'm angry about my helplessness to tangibly right such wrongs. Greed is eternally in play. Greed on the part of the owners and the corporate titans who profit off the toil of those whose misfortune is to be born into privation. However, greed is a convenient straw-man. After all, greed's been with us, in us since time immemorial. What's lacking in us is the capacity and resolute commitment for developing stable, robust systems for managing greed, holding it in check and sharply punishing it when it inevitably gets out of hand. This is a global problem. I saw uncontrolled greed all around me growing up in India. I see it all around me working in the US. When we reflexively bemoan greed, we do nothing but abjure our responsibility, tacitly deflecting it by pretending the problem's unchangeable, too vast, too entrenched and our efforts too meagre, too weak and too ineffectual to effect meaningful change. We'd rather be left to drink our daily cuppa undisturbed. Certain problems are age-old, after all. We can't live our lives tilting at wind-mills. Those who consider themselves grown-up are the most proficient at wearing this particular mask. Nothing grown-up about the attitude though. No, rather it's nothing but a cheat. It's punting that has a distinctly yellow cast.

When thousands of tea estate workers on the Kanan Devan Hills Plantation, one of the largest tea estates in South India, walked off protesting their work conditions and pay (see Part 1), I was with them in spirit. I cheered when they won their much-deserved and much-denied work benefits. For once, the have-nots stood together long enough to stare down the entrenched, unjustly empowered. It will take just such effort to brick-by-brick dismantle the old constructs, mental and literal, that form the foundation of so much of the human-made world. Constructs that reek with the rottenness of our common and messily entangled colonial, imperialist past with its sharp, unforgiving and utterly superfluous divisions of class, caste, ethnicity, nationality. Brave new world? I certainly hope not. Rather, a world where the institutions we build constantly scrutinize themselves, and are scrutinized and held accountable in practice, not just on paper. A world with systems of checks and balances that don't tacitly look the other way when faced with incontrovertible proof of injustice. A world where we live in genuine, not self-deceiving, comfort.

https://tirumalaikamala.quora.com/Dignity-is-in-work-not-in-the-nature-of-the-work-Part-VI

Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work. Part V. Why a cup of tea shouldn't be anyone's cup of tea, Part 1.

Part I: With the nature and value of work in harmony, dignity in work no longer an ignominy.  Part I by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
Part II: Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work.  Part II by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
Part III: Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work.  Part III by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
Part IV: Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work.  Part IV by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk

Aren't tea plantations the very picture of tranquility? Set in picturesque mountainsides, mist and lush greenery merge to create picture-perfect tourist havens. The dismal reality of Indian tea plantation workers' lives stands in obscene contrast, wage theft the least of the abominations they endure.

With more than an estimated million directly and nearly 6 million indirectly employed across some 150000 tea estates, the Indian tea industry is literally big business in every sense of the phrase. To fully appreciate the scale of egregious labor abuse in the Indian tea industry, we need to start in 1951. India's tea industry is governed by the Plantation Labour Act of 1951. This Act applies to any tea grower with >15 workers or operates a plantation of >5 acres (Page on teaboard.gov.in). On paper the Plantation Labour Act exudes acumen, compassion and foresight. After all it guarantees housing, toilets, water supply, recreational facilities, day care for children below 5 years of age, life insurance, medical insurance, sick leave, and educational facilities for plantation workers' children. In other words, the Act envisioned the Indian tea plantation to be a microcosm of an idealized welfare state. Certainly it's so on paper. Problem is that's where it's stubbornly stayed and there lies the rub because 60 years and counting, many of the provisions of the Act remain unimplemented. For e.g., many plantations built toilets for workers only in 2000-2001. Many plantations still lack electricity supply.

I started this post on a very different tack, intending to highlight the Everest-like scale of Indian tea estate labor abuses uncovered by recent investigative reports by the Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute and by the BBC.

Thankfully real-life events of a much more empowering kind temporarily but happily derailed me from that dismal prospect. Instead of dwelling on a gloomy tale of deprivation, abuse and chicanery, I can revel in the carpe diem of a few thousand resolute women who stood up to both management and trade unions, unyielding in their demands for a wage hike, bonus and medical facilities, and then it happened, the powers-that-be blinked.

Irony guides us to the appropriate place to start and that's in July 2015. Kanan Devan Hills Plantations (KDHP; Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company Private Limited) is the largest tea estate in Munnar. A Hill stationin Indian parlance, Munnar is a popular tourist destination in the South Indian state of Kerala. Go ahead, check out Munnar on Wikipedia or Google Images. It hardly seems possible that imagination could improve on Munnar's heaven-on-earth picture-postcard perfection. Yet entirely through the volition of man-made actions, the tea workers' abjectly impoverished lives stand in stark abnegation of this heart-stopping natural beauty.

In July 2015, the Great Place to Work Institute and People Matters, an entity that bills itself as a Human Resources knowledge platform, whatever that means, lauded KDHP as having some of the best management practices in India (Munnar tea agitation is a warning to companies, politicians and... union leaders).

Ironically, early in September 2015, >5000 of KDHP workers went on strike demanding higher wages and bonuses. For 9 days, neither politicians nor labour unions could budge them from their demands. Finally, Oommen Chandy, Kerala's Chief Minister himself stepped into the breach and negotiated management's acceptance of the striking workers' demands for a 20% bonus.

What started the workers' agitation in the first place? KDHP was owned by Tata Tea Limited until 2005 when it divested itself of active tea plantation management across India to focus on its branded tea business though it retains minority stake in many of them (Tata Global Beverages). It used to own 17 tea estates in Munnar with nearly 13000 workers. Sounding excellent on paper, owning 68% of KDHP's shares, the workers were now co-owners, each owning 300 shares each. In actuality, the lofty-sounding co-ownership stamp got the workers nothing but a paltry yearly dividend. In 2014, this amounted to a mere Rs. 300. Then, in a sudden move, citing reduced profits, the company announced it would slash 2015's bonus from 19% down to 10%. The match was lit. The agitation was on.

What made this strike different? Not union leaders but workers themselves, mostly women, stood in solidarity on the frontline, shunning politicians and trade unions alike (Stir against Kanan Devan intensifies in Munnar, VS calls it Tata's 'fraud' company).

For example, sensing electoral opportunity a local politician arrived at the scene, ostensibly to lend his support to the workers' demands. The workers firmly and unhesitatingly shooed him away (Page on thenewsminute.com).

Weren't trade unions set up to safeguard tea plantation workers and negotiate with management on their behalf? After all, these aren't just any trade unions. All India Trade Union Congress, Centre of Indian Trade Unions and Indian National Trade Union Congress, these are storied, well-established unions with all-India presence. Sounds like over time, they'd lost the workers' trust.  'The women alleged that the trade union leaders had colluded with the management of the Kannan Devan Hills Plantations Limited (KDHP) to deny them 20 per cent bonus' (Kerala: 4,000 tea workers protest bonus cut, keep unions out in Munnar).

Let's revisit the irony that started this story because therein lies a necessary eye-opener. Let's also consider other choice words from the word salad incessantly drummed up by PR-marketing brigades to disingenuously embellish modern day corporate products. Ethical, sustainable, certified, and the most gilded lily of them all, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). When it comes to tea, especially branded tea, these saccharine-sweet words of lofty idealism slosh about merrily but hollowly in our tea cups. For what kind of CSR is even remotely credible when the very foundation of the tea business, the workers, are treated worse than the tea leaves they harvest? And what value accolades from industry and trade groups when real-life events upend carefully orchestrated corporate narratives to reveal the mean tawdriness that actually lurks below the thread-bare front of such rubber-stamped approvals?

Why is this a rare happy work story? Hitherto disempowered and voiceless, these workers stood together and Goliath slunk away in defeat, at least so far. Cohesion. Over 9 days, the previously disenfranchised stood together. The playbook says different. Usually leaderless agitations rapidly break apart, novice leaders-in-the-making either threatened or bribed to toe the management line, even killed. However it happened, this time that time-tested inevitable didn't come to pass.

Maybe the uncommonly mature and thoughtful role the police chose to play during the 9 days of agitation helped, 'The best help the police did was to ensure that the liquor shops were closed during the agitation,” said Rajan, a leader of the agitating employees. This ensured that there were no untoward incidents during the protest by the woman workers'...and then, even more remarkably, 'When the agitation became intense, the workers closed the roads from the morning to the evening, and the police, sensing the mood, did not resort to using force and instead allowed them to have their say' (Kanan Devan Hills Plantations workers all praise for cops).

Fair wage for a fair day's work. Not wage theft, not impoverished catchphrases like CSR to dress up the rotting carcasses of Potemkin villages that have become so much a part of modern day work life. Dignity in work, not in the nature of the work.

The Sep 2015 all-women Munnar tea estate strike:
A clear, comprehensive summary of its genesis, A Green Blood Women’s Revolution In Munnar By Binu Mathew
A political perspective on the rarity of such a women-led labour movement, The Woman Worker Re-emerges - Lessons from Munnar

A linked post on the sordid reality behind a daily cuppa joe (cup of coffee) here: Tirumalai Kamala's answer to What are some interesting illustrations of the adage "There is no ethical consumption in late capitalism"?.

https://tirumalaikamala.quora.com/Dignity-is-in-work-not-in-the-nature-of-the-work-Part-V

Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work. Part IV

Part I: With the nature and value of work in harmony, dignity in work no longer an ignominy.  Part I by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
Part II: Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work.  Part II by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
Part III: Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work.  Part III by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
 
How ghastly it is to contemplate that we live in a world where boredom is an unattainable luxury for the multitude who make ease and convenience possible for the rest of us few. With access to browse the internet at our leisure we are a much more visible and vocal but tiny handful that feasts off of the labor of a vast multitude who toil to make our daily lives possible and yet who are rendered easily invisible.

Sometimes, it seems hardly a week goes by without gurus, pundits and their numerous, willing and credulous amplifiers expounding glibly about Work-Life Balance or the Pareto Principle or Life Hack or some other fad. What part of global human life experience are they mining? The purview of a lucky few. With modicum of financial stability and security our bulwark, and internet access, indoor plumbing, electricity and a solid roof over our heads givens, we are that lucky few.

Yet look around with a more discerning eye and I see everywhere around me the labor of that invisible multitude. My T-shirts, sneakers, smart phone and laptop are only the more visible signs of their mind-numbing toil.

Look around my home. All the fixtures, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. Every wall covered with pictures. All those picture frames. Who made them? Surely not anyone toiling in a US factory. Likely an ill-paid factory worker in China. After all the stickers do proclaim, 'Made in China'. Likely no work safety, no paid leave, certainly no Work-Life Balance for them.

Life hack. How that phrase sickens me. It only serves to emphasize how permanently we remain divided into the few Haves who can afford to wallow in self-comforting panaceas about Life Hacks and Work-Life Balances while the rest of the vast, invisible Have-nots have no choice but to supply the labor that makes our caterwauling possible. So much of our daily life sustained by their labor. The Dickensian world of endless toil in sub-human conditions is a historical vignette of the Industrial Revolution only for us lucky few. For the multitude who toil to make our lives easy and comfortable, it's a painful and inescapable daily reality. Where the luxury of Life Hacks and Work-Life Balance for this vast invisible multitude?  Only reason for their ill-fate? Missing the birth lottery.

Every lemon in the grocery store has a little sticker on it. Who put it there? Who packs the lettuce so clean and tight into these plastic bags? Surely not yet the work of robots. Some human toiled in work conditions I'd find sub-human to put that rubber band on the cilantro bunch I just used in my cooking.

We live in a globalized world so it matters not one whit where we live. One way or another, this basic edict of obscene work caste sustains our lives, imbued in the garb that cover our bodies, in the electronic gadgets that enable our work and allay our tedium, and most importantly, in the very food that sustains our life.

Food. Is anything more important to life than food? And yet, the labor necessary for growing our food and bringing it to our plates we deem less dignified and hence less valuable than all the so-called white-collar work of dubious value we netizens engage in to earn the bucks to procure it. Only with something terribly wrong in the way we compute and bestow value could we live with such debased value systems. Debased all the more because birth lottery underpins every aspect of it.

https://tirumalaikamala.quora.com/Dignity-is-in-work-not-in-the-nature-of-the-work-2

Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work. Part III

Part I: With the nature and value of work in harmony, dignity in work no longer an ignominy.  Part I by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
Part II: Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work.  Part II by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk
 
Apprenticeship is implicit in the scientific enterprise but the elephant in the room is that it's insular and parochial. The purview of the initiated, it excludes more than includes. The latter are the select few, post-graduates, doctoral students, post-docs and junior faculty. The former, the more numerous support staff, the technicians, animal caretakers, core facility staff.

Most basic biomedical research involves use of experimental animal models. Mouse is the most popular. How are research animal facilities organized? Usually physically separate from the labs where scientists spend most of their working hours, they operate as if in a parallel world. Here's yet another hierarchy to explain. In animal facilities, the pyramid consists of veterinarians, technicians, floor leaders and near the bottom of the rung, the animal caretakers, the ones who actually handle the animals day in and day out, change their cages, food and water, observe them for signs of ill-health, every single day, holidays included be it Christmas, New Year or Thanksgiving. Bottom of the rung? Those who don't even come near live animals. Those who spend all their day in the back, cleaning and sterilizing the cages and sundry, and handling the daily numerous dead.

The years I spent at the US NIH were the surfeit of its gravy train. The NIH budget was increasing year on year and yet it didn't make a whit of difference in the lives of those toiling on the bottom rung. The most obvious sign of something different? I first observed how the animal care staff tended to be largely black or immigrant, usually from South America or Africa. Plenty from Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal. This at a time when post-docs at NIH from sub-Saharan Africa were at an all-time low. Apparently no room or applicants among the included, the apprentices and above. Plenty among the excluded.

By no means the only exclusion. I'll never forget my first glimpse behind another obscene curtain of exclusion. A young woman animal caretaker doubled over upon herself in pain in the changing room of the animal facility. Black, an immigrant from some North African country.

Research animal facilities have a similar design edict. Enter and one is forced to go through into the changing rooms to don the PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) before one can proceed through into the main facility where the research animals are housed in individual rooms. This young woman writhing in pain. What to do?

Another caretaker steps into the changing room. I ask her if there's anything we could do to help this young woman in pain. She shrugs and says no. The woman in pain had given birth the previous week. A difficult delivery. She was suffering from the consequences. Aghast, I asked what she was doing back at work so soon? What else to do? She needed the money. What? No paid maternity leave? No, only unpaid and she needed the money. How could that be? Easy, we three may have been working at the NIH, a US federal government agency that provides at least a few weeks of paid maternity leave but they and their ilk weren't federal government employees. They were employees of a contractor who had the contract for running that research animal facility. Paid a relative pittance, physically demanding jobs, and that's not all. Their numbers are now legion. That reduction in government jobs? Simply expansion of contractors. In every agency, at all levels. As well, in the case of science, excluded from scientific recognition.

Scientific recognition. Another Rabelesian joke of an exclusion. Scientists and their apprentices spend a fraction of their work time among the research animals that have become the bread and butter of so much of their research. Support staff, in particular animal caretakers spend almost all their work time among them. Yet, the data and knowledge ensuing from such science consists solely of the input of scientists and their apprentices. How could this be right?

We know from observations across all human endeavor that practice makes perfect. Someone who actually plays the piano knows more about playing the piano than one who reads about it or just imagines it. How could I, a scientist, be presumed to know more about research mice when I spent at most a few hours per week among them compared to those caretakers who spent all their work hours among them?

In fact I know I learned a lot more about research mice from veterinary technicians and caretakers than from my PI or colleagues. The ones who practice more know more. As simple as that. And yet that inevitable value judgment that accompanies work stratification negates the value of the contribution of those at the lowest rung of the scientific enterprise, debases it and even renders it invisible and worthless. I often wonder how knowledge that ensues from such a grotesque system be merit worthy. It just can't since it excludes the most holistically obtained knowledge. These animal caretakers observe the research animals every single day and know so much more about the nuances of their health and behavior, and yet their knowledge is neither sought nor documented nor recognized. A system of work organization that is not only seriously flawed in its design but also in its intent. The structure of the biomedical research enterprise. A hierarchy that proscribes more than welcomes. Encoded in its very structure with exclusion in its very marrow.

I still remember the little gift bags I used to prepare so carefully for each staff member I worked with in all those animal facilities. Every Christmas. So trite and pathetic. I wanted to change an obscene status quo but I was only one person. Myself an immigrant with my own problems. How could I change an entire system? Yet I felt compelled to do something. So those little gift bags, each costing less than $10. Just a box of candy from CVS and a card. My way of saying I recognize you and your contributions to my research work.

If only the systems within which we find ourselves operating were self-aware enough to be more equitable. If only we each have the political will to make it so. Only then will we have ourselves a world where dignity lies in work, not in the nature of the work.

https://tirumalaikamala.quora.com/Dignity-is-in-work-not-in-the-nature-of-the-work-1