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DHAKA: Almost 150,000 employees at greater than 200 Bangladeshi tea plantations went on strike Saturday to demand a 150 per cent rise to their dollar-a-day wages, which researchers say are among the many lowest on the earth.
Most tea employees within the overwhelmingly Muslim nation are low-caste Hindus, the descendants of labourers dropped at the plantations by colonial-era British planters.
The minimal wage for a tea plantation employee within the nation is 120 taka a day — about $1.25 at official charges, however solely simply over a greenback on the free market.
One employee stated that was barely sufficient to purchase meals, not to mention different requirements.
“These days we will not even afford coarse rice for our household with this quantity,” stated Anjana Bhuyian, 50.
“A wage of at some point cannot purchase a litre of edible oil. How can we then even take into consideration our diet, remedy, or kids’s schooling?” she advised AFP.
Unions are demanding a rise to 300 taka a day, with inflation rising and the foreign money depreciating, and stated that employees within the nation’s 232 tea gardens started a full-scale strike on Saturday, after 4 days of two-hour stoppages.
“Almost 150,000 tea employees have joined the strike in the present day,” stated Sitaram Bin, a committee member of the Bangladesh Tea Employees’ Union.
“No tea employee will pluck tea leaves or work within the leaf processing vegetation so long as the authority does not pay heed to our calls for,” he advised AFP.
Plantation homeowners have provided a rise of 14 taka a day, after an 18-taka rise final 12 months and M. Shah Alom, chairman of the Bangladesh Tea Affiliation, stated operators had been “going by means of troublesome occasions with revenue declining in latest occasions”.
“The price of manufacturing is growing. Our bills have elevated as the value of fuel, fertiliser and diesel have gone up,” he advised AFP.
Researchers say tea employees — who reside in a number of the nation’s most distant areas — have been systematically exploited by the trade for many years.
“Tea employees are like modern-day slaves,” stated Philip Achieve, director of the Society for Surroundings and Human Improvement, a analysis group, who has written books on tea employees.
“The plantation homeowners have hijacked the minimal wage authorities and saved the wages a number of the lowest on the earth.”
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