Feminist Labor Politics in the Neo-Liberal Era: Tea Plantation Labor Struggle in Munnar Tea Plantations, India

A labor protest in 2015 by around 5000 women workers belonging to Kannan Devan Hills Plantations (KDHP) in Munnar of Kerala state, India, has received wider media attention. After around three weeks of struggle, both by stopping the plucking of tea leaves and staging their protest by blocking the main roads, the government of Kerala intervened and assured to increase the bonus and minimum wage that the protesters demanded. Women raised severe criticism against their organized trade unions for failing to represent the collective interest of workers and formed their own trade union, namely, “Pembilai Orumai” (Women’s Unity). In response to the global crisis in the tea market, there was a significant shift in the management structure of the tea plantations in 2004 from Tata Tea, a multi-national Indian company, to a workers’ owned KDH Private Limited Company by mooting employee buy-out scheme and allowing the workers to become the shareholders of the company.

It is against this backdrop this paper analyses the factors that led to the struggle and the impact of the protest on labor rights and working conditions. It employed the feminist labor geography framework - how gender, labour and geography (places with their changing spatial markers and the mobility of capital) created certain disabling conditions for women that produced greater resentment and collective resistance. By examining the modes of protest, slogans raised, collectivization strategies employed, forms of negotiations with the State and the Company, and efforts to forge solidarity with various civil society movements, I argue that there is a marked shift in their articulation of politics from rigid trade unionism towards building a feminist socialist politics of claim-making. In the context of the Indian State's neo-liberal transition, this protest should be documented as an interesting example of changing capital-labor relations constraining labor.