Labor on the Line: Justice at Work on Assam Tea Plantations

Labor on the Line provides insights into the world’s largest tea-growing region of Assam. Anna-Lena Wolf examines everyday conceptualizations of justice: how they emerge, become prevalent, transform, and are negotiated by differently positioned actors on Assam’s tea plantations. Academics and activists have criticized the conditions on these plantations as a form of bondage, arguing that the persistence of a colonial wage structure--characterized by low cash wages supplemented with in-kind benefits--reinforces laborers’ dependence on plantations. But Wolf shows that there is more to the story. Tea plantation laborers and trade unionists formed surprising alliances with managers and plantation owners based on everyday conceptions of justice. All involved favored the old-style plantation at a time when fundamental changes were appearing in the political economy of tea production.

Labor on the Line challenges the simplistic notion that dismantling tea plantations would create a better world for tea plantation laborers, by advancing notions of justice in innovative ways.

Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as open access volumes through the Cornell Open initiative.

Anna-Lena Wolf is a legal anthropologist with a focus on justice imaginaries, human rights, labor rights, and social movements. She is Lecturer at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.