Proper Gander: Exploitation at work (2023)

The Proper Gander TV column from the April 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

When we buy a product, it’s easy not to think about the long journey it has made to reach us, through the combined effort of countless people across the world. A cup of tea often starts out in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, where its tea leaves are grown and picked before being sent on for processing and packing. The workers who pick the leaves which eventually end up in our morning cuppa tend to be women living close to poverty. Like many in the primary sector, their work on the tea plantations involves lengthy, repetitive shifts for low pay, made even worse for them by a culture where sexual abuse is common.

This was the focus of a disturbing edition of BBC One’s Panorama: Sex For Work: The True Cost Of Our Tea. The documentary investigated plantations in Kenya owned by two British companies – Unilever and James Finlay & Co – which produce half the tea drunk in the UK, sold under brands such as PG Tips, Lipton and Sainsbury’s Red Label. Researchers interviewed a hundred women tea pickers, and as many as 75 said they had suffered sexual harassment by managers at their workplace.

Heading the programme is journalist Tom Odula, but credit should go to the undercover reporter who put herself at risk by applying for work on the plantations. Much of the documentary comprises footage filmed on a hidden camera by ‘Katie’. This shows that women being pushed into having sex with senior staff is rife, despite the problem being recognised at least as far back as 2011. Then, a report was published by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations about the extent of sexual abuse in Unilever’s operations, which led to them introducing a new ‘zero tolerance’ policy and reporting system. These are put to the test when Katie applies for a job at a Unilever plantation and gets asked by a Divisional Manager, Jeremiah Koskei, to meet in a bar. There, she records him talking about how they could spend the night at his home, following a pattern described by other women seeking work on the plantation. ‘It felt pretty transactional’ says Katie later. Despite rejecting his advances, she gets employed and is assigned the gruelling task of weeding for up to 10 hours a day, at a rate of the equivalent of £25 for a six-day week. When Katie asks for different duties, supervisor Samuel Yebei sees this as an opportunity to pressure her to sleep with him in return. After she resists, he gives up, and five weeks later she hasn’t been moved to a better role. One of the women Odula interviews says that she was in such a desperate situation that she was coerced into having sex with Yebei to keep her job and then contracted HIV. We’re told that one reason Yebei has got away with his behaviour is that he is close to Koskei, but complaints have been dismissed before they even reach them. When Katie reports them both to the company’s sexual harassment officer, instead of looking into the matter he just advises her to protect herself. While the documentary was being made, Unilever sold its tea brands and fields to a venture capital company, now operating as Lipton Teas and Infusions, which has suspended the two managers pending an investigation.

A similar culture was found in plantations owned by James Finlay & Co, whose tea is sold by Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Starbucks. Odula speaks with a woman (already suffering from an injury from her work) who refused to have sex with a manager in order to get a job, and regrets that her daughters didn’t make the same decision. She reported harassment but hasn’t had a response. Many of the women interviewed name John Chebochok, a recruiter for James Finlay & Co, as a predator. Katie goes to meet him for a job interview, which she is told will be held in a hotel room. There, he says he will give her money and a job if she has sex with him, which escalates to him pinning her against a window before he gives up and goes. After three months of undercover reporting, Katie quits the plantations and receives counselling. Finlays later said it suspended and reported Chebochok to the police, and is now investigating whether its operation has ‘an endemic issue with sexual violence’.

Panorama’s report from Kenya recalls exposés of similar practices in other organisations. Women in Haiti in poorly paid jobs making clothes for American brands were pressurised by their managers to have sex or have their contracts ended, according to an article published by the Guardian (23 June). In Congo, more than 50 women alleged that aid workers, including some from the World Health Organisation, had demanded sex from them to get or keep jobs as cooks, cleaners and community workers during an Ebola crisis (Reuters, 29/09/20). As in Kenya, the poverty the women were living in often meant they had little choice.

The hierarchies which are built into the capitalist structures of organisations put people like Chebochok, Yebei and Koskei in positions of power. And the wider economic system makes people – women who rely on wages from any work they can get, in this instance – vulnerable to being used by this predatory type of man for their own gratification. Because these managers are enforcing the exploitation of the women through their employment, they also feel entitled to exploit them sexually. They see and treat the women as objects because the system creates the conditions in which this can happen. Reforms and a shift in culture may eventually lessen the threat of sexual abuse for women such as those on the plantations, but won’t address the root cause of the problem.

Mike Foster

"King of the Castle" (1945)

From the October 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is strange what material the socialist finds to his hand in his investigations into the phenomena of society. A book picked up casually, as was the case with the writer, may well throw light upon yet another aspect of that great struggle that is continually with us; through world wars and the uneasy peace periods in between: the class struggle.

The book that is the subject of this article is one by Rumer Godden, and has the strange title, "Rungli-Rungliot.” This means in Paharia "thus far and no further,” a description one might apply to the authoress's socialist knowledge. She is, without a doubt, a fine descriptive writer. One has only to shut one's eyes after reading this sentence in her picture of the house on the slopes of the Himalayas. "The lawn ends in clouds that are sweeping below it,” and one is there both in spirit and imagination. The socialist, however, whilst taking pleasure in looking at the scenery through her eyes, finds most interest in that part of the book that deals with the lives and toilings of the coolies.

That this particular section of the working-class; the coolies of North Bengal, India, live very unhappy lives, is evident from even Rumer Godden’s unseeing pen. Some of the chapters take one back to Marx’s description of the conditions in English factories of the nineteenth-century period. No wonder that even the unenlightened masses of India are beginning to take notice of the results emanating from the rule of the British section of the capitalist class.

The scene of this book is set in a tea garden on the slopes of the Himalayas, and is surrounded on all sides by similar tea gardens—this being excellent tea growing country. This particular tea garden, according to the authoress, consists of two thousand five hundred acres managed by one white man. To quote her words about the manager and his wife: "Their prestige on the estate is enormous. He is king and she is queen and their power among the people is absolute. A less nice man would have become complicated, but W. is genuinely popular and full of a lordly happiness, all the happier and good to see because it is so lordly.” (Page 16.)

We get another view of this "king of the tea garden” when it had been raining heavily, persistently for six days. The authoress says the rain was not so depressing because "The constant drumming noise on the tin roof had something steady and soothing about it.” "Twice W.,” she goes on, "has had to ring the gong at midday to call them in, it was too saturating even for them." (Our italics.)

The manager may have appeared to the ignorant coolies (and the authoress!) to possess the powers of a king, but he was under no illusions himself. He knew well that to that particular section of the capitalist class who deal in the commodity tea he was just another manager, to be replaced if the output of tea declined, whether it be due to rain, drought, snow, earthquake), or any visitation of nature. This may explain why he was straining every nerve and muscle (of his coolies?) to increase the output from four hundred and fifty pounds of tea last year to half a million this (1942).

That the manager of this particular tea garden may or may not have been a shade better in his attitude towards the Indian working class is a point that need not bother us unduly. We have an account of earth-works being built in this and neighbouring gardens. In the gardens, it appears, children carry baskets of earth upon their hacks. The big difference between W. and other garden managers, in the eyes of the authoress, is that he does not employ children under a certain age for this heavy work. One might just as well say, that the capitalist of the nineteenth century who did not employ children under the age of, say, seven, was more humane than hie fellow capitalists. It is only a question of degree; the principle remains the same.

To the members of the reformist parties of this country who urge the putting in order of our own "house” before attempting that of others we reply: Put this "house” in order by all means, and by that we mean not a new layer of paint, but the demolition of the structure so that the new can be built. In other words: we have constantly stressed the fact that reforming the capitalist system will not remove the causes of society's inequality that are the foundation of that system. Only the replacement of the capitalist system by socialism will do that, and it is for that reason we seek to throw light upon the activities of the capitalist class in other countries; and for the same reason that there are five political parties throughout the world bolding to the same object and principles, though independenty.

Socialism, of its very conception, must be international. That is the reason why the workers in Australia. New Zealand. U.S. of America, Canada, and Great Britain, who have formed political parties striving for socialism are the vanguard of the working class in their struggle for emancipation. We ask those people who are attempting to alleviate the lot of the workers of India to examine the S.P.G.B.'s case, and agree that the next step must be the formation in India a political party whose object is not to reform the capitalist system, but to establish a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of society as a whole

L. Young.

Blogger's Note:

There's a strong chance that 'L.Young' was Len Young, who was a member of the Birmingham Branch of the SPGB.

The relief of Abstinence. (1924)

From the June 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

The latest returns of the tea-producing companies illustrate the enormous amount of unpaid labour that is appropriated by the Capitalist.

The following table shows the dividends of five companies for 1922 and 1923 :—

From the above it will be seen that the shareholders have received on the average over two-thirds of the money back that they invested, and yet they may still have their original amount invested in the company—and this has been accomplished within two years !

Thirty-two pounds a year (out of every hundred originally invested) for doing nothing—not a bad way of obtaining a living. And yet when the engineers, the coal miners, or the railway men, ask for a paltry shilling or two more a week for 47 hours or so of arduous work under unhealthy conditions, this is the type of people who cannot find epithets strong enough to condemn such action.

The shareholder invests money in a company (or a paid official does it for him) and then he can go to sleep or go to Jericho with the pleasant conviction that at the end of a given period a nice fat sum will come to him, and at the end of further periods further fat sums will be forthcoming. The idea is spread about that these nice fat sums are the reward of “abstinence.” This suggestion would be quite alright if “abstinence” was intended to mean abstaining from useful work. But such is not the intention though it is a fact. We are required to believe that these people abstain from spending the money on pleasures in order to invest it. Yet curiously enough it is at pleasure resorts of various kinds that the wealthy shareholders are found. Who is it occupies the first-class berths on ocean going liners? The abstainer. Who harries the big game in the mighty forests and jungles of Africa and India? The abstainer. Who dodges the harshness of the English, winter by taking the first-class trans-Continental express for the Riviera ? The abstainer. Who puts as many miles as possible between himself and the ugly factory towns in which is his wealth is produced? Why the poor hardly used abstainer, of course.

But everything has an end, even though the end be but the beginning of something else. One day the selfish worker will take pity on the altruistic shareholder and will save the latter from the “miseries” associated with “abstinence.” The workers will take unto themselves the fruits of industry to set off against the toils. That day the shareholder will be relieved of his idleness as well as his abstinence. For that he should bless us, but, alas, I fear he will curse us. Our motives are the best and we wish to make of him a happy, healthy, and useful human being.

Gilmac.

A Great Contradiction: Ca' Canny - A Capitalist Necessity. (1920)

From the November 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has become quite a fashion with capitalist speakers and writers on social subjects to wind up their perorations with demands or appeals for greater production. Now, if production, in any industry, or in all industries, has fallen off, it must be due to one of two causes. Either the individual worker produces less, or fewer workers are engaged in production. In either case it is quite clear that, from a purely material point of view, a lower production is due to reduced expenditure of energy by the workers.

The Cause of Confusion.

The working class is composed of people who work. The capitalist class do not work, therefore the workers doing less work is the cause of reduced output.

If this question were confined to the material point of view alone, everything would be clear, and those who do not work at all would be held responsible for the shortage, especially when it was noted that they consumed the largest share of the wealth produced.

In a colony of ants or a hive of bees there is nothing to confuse the material point of view. There the relations are between ants or bees and nature. Social relations are simple, and are not confused by questions of ownership, exchange, and so on. All the members of the colony, or hive, take part in the necessary labour and share according to their needs. In human society, however, things are not so simple—private or class ownership of wealth transforms relations that should be clear into a veritable pandemonium of conflicting interests.

Working a Stunt.

Every capitalist newspaper and magazine contains articles deploring the shortage of commodities and blaming the workers for it. When the workers in any industry determine to strike for higher wages because rising prices compel them to do so, a howl of protest goes up because output will be reduced. In short, the word has gone round for the reduced output stunt to be worked for all it is worth, with the result that one fine morning we read in every capitalist paper, side by side with the customary lecture on increased production, accounts of numbers of factories closing down and thousands of workers unemployed. Even then the prostitute writers and speakers of the capitalist Press make frantic efforts to blame the workers for the falling off in trade. Trade is bad, they say, because the capitalists cannot afford to pay the high wages prevailing, or because the workers deliberately work at a slower pace.

Capitalist Ca'canny.

Now, the power of the workers to go slow or hold up production is almost negligible. Their need for wages, and the fact that there are always more workers than jobs, throws them into competition with one another and compels them to work at top speed. In any case they must work to live.

But not so the capitalists, who never work, and yet are the last to suffer when production is impeded. Moreover, it is often to the interest of capitalists that production should be slowed up and they never hesitate to use the power they possess in that direction—a power that is far greater than the workers possess, because they (the capitalists) own and control the means of wealth-production.

In the long and futile wrangle that preceded the coal strike, the miners, who evidently knew what they were talking about, in this respect at least, accused the companies of refraining from working the best seams, reserving them for the time when Government control was removed.

During the last few weeks newspapers have quoted numerous instances of factories in a large number of industries curtailing production by working shorter time. Not long ago we read about milk poured down drains and fish flung back into the sea or allowed to rot, to be then sold for manure.

The Proper Thing to do.

In all such cases it seems to be taken for granted that the stoppage of production, or the deliberate waste of wealth, is the only possible thing to do in the circumstances. No one questions, for instance, that in the case of tea anything other should be done than is done by the tea-growing associations, that is, circularising all growers to reduce their output 20 per cent. With a surplus stock of 120 million pounds it is absurd that anyone should go short of tea. It is absurd, too, that any other question than the satisfaction of human needs should be considered, yet in reality this question is not considered at all. The whole question whether production shall go on or not depends entirely on whether it is profitable to some capitalist or capitalist company.

A member of the Ceylon Tea Growers' Association says that "their action (limiting output) is an attempt to save the companies from being wiped out, for it is obvious that production cannot be continued at a loss." Carried to its logical conclusion this means that if production ceases to provide profits for the capitalist class the human race must perish.

Who Produce the Wealth?

Everybody knows that the cute business man pretends to be running his business at a loss. The industrial capitalists (especially the small fish) are often between the devil and the deep sea when they try to square accounts with the money-lender and the landlord. But this squaring process always takes place after the workers have produced the wealth. It could not possibly take place before, because there would be nothing to share. The companies do not produce the tea, neither do the moneylenders nor the landlords. Nor do they contribute anything, either in the shape of labour (mental or manual) or material toward its production. The things they own—land, money, machinery, etc.—are either nature-given, or the result of working class energy applied to what is nature-given.

Why, then, should the existence of companies be considered at all? If they perform no useful function they would not be missed if they were all wiped out, and the workers of the world produced the tea—and all the other things they need—in the quantities they require and according to a settled plan. It would, of course, be galling to the capitalists to be forced to realise that production goes on to-day without assistance from them, and that there is no excuse for their existence as a separate class ; but it would be still more galling to know that the workers had discovered it, and were organising to act upon the knowledge.

Besides being a useless class, the capitalist class consumes twice the quantity of wealth consumed by the working class. A writer in the "Sunday Pictorial," Mr. Lovat Fraser, says that if the wealth taken by the capitalist class were shared among the workers it would be no more than a drop in a bucket. This is obviously untrue, because the workers would then share the whole product, which is three times greater than their total wages.

Capitalists MUST Curtail Production.

But the wealth taken by the capitalists, either as rent, interest, or profit, is produced by the workers. It is evident, therefore, that the capitalist system is a system whereby the workers are robbed of the major portion of the wealth they produce by an idle class ; but this is not all. The system which enables this robbery to take place is so arranged that production cannot go beyond a certain point without causing the rate of profit obtained by the capitalists to fall, so that they are forced to curtail production in their own interests.

What can be said in favour of such a system ?

An idle class takes two-thirds of the wealth produced by the workers, and then stops production, not only before the needs of the workers are satisfied, but by that very act of stoppage condemning the workers in ever-increasing numbers to unemployment and starvation.

The Crux of the Matter.

Meanwhile a swarm of mercenary intellectuals continue to shriek for greater output from those who remain in employment, exhorting them, all the time, to economise in order that wages can be reduced. These are the fruits of a system based on class ownership of the means of life. Unemployment side by side with a shortage of the necessaries of life ; millions of willing workers in all capitalist countries held back from the work of producing wealth, and starving meanwhile, because capitalist companies, that are not even necessary to production, will suffer a reduction in profits if the workers are allowed to carry on.

In the face of well-established and obvious facts like the foregoing Mr. Lovat Fraser has the hardihood to declare that high prices are the result of reduced output, in its turn the result of high wages, which induce leisure. It is, of course, unfortunate for this contention that capitalists everywhere should compel workers in increasing numbers to take more leisure in the shape of unemployment. Forced leisure and diminished output is the great contradiction within the capitalist system that, when fully revealed, becomes the motive for its abolition. When Mr. Fraser, in the midst of wholesale unemployment, whines "it is not a rich world," he reveals this contradiction by the violence with which he brings the two material facts together.

A Pertinent Question.

With modern methods of production and a sane system of society, sufficient wealth could be produced to satisfy the needs of a population enormously greater than exists upon the earth at the present time. Then why stop production before those living on it to-day are satisfied ? Because the world's markets can only be won by cheap commodities, says the capitalist.

Precisely; it is the capitalist need for cheap commodities with which to win markets that causes unemployment, low wages, and intensive toil. And the hardships and poverty of the workers increases as the struggle for markets becomes keener. Those who cannot keep up the pace are ruthlessly flung on one side to make room for younger men and women. Labour-saving machinery, which Mr. Robert Young, M.P., says ("Reynolds's Newspaper," 12.9.20) will solve the problem of diminished output, can only flood the markets and accelerate the process that is rapidly making the capitalist system impossible—because it will no longer satisfy the bare wants of the majority— while at the same time revealing unlimited possibilities in the direction of wealth production.

The Remedy Revealed.

To reconcile this great contradiction society must be established on a basis where the means of wealth production are owned in common and democratically controlled. Then the production and distribution of all kinds of wealth can be arranged according to the needs of the people themselves.

But these two systems are opposed to each other ; and the conflicting principles of the two systems are represented by the conflicting interests of the two classes in society to-day. The conflict is between the class that owns and controls and the class that is dispossessed. The antagonism is revealed in the continual struggle over wages.

Working-class interests conflict with capitalist interests at every point, and the bitterness between the two classes increases as the struggle becomes more severe and the workers recognise its nature. Manifesting itself on the industrial field, the class struggle can only be ended on the political field, by the organised workers gaining control of the political machine, and using the armed forces and the machinery of the State to clear the way for the establishment of Socialism.

F. Foan

More tea, vicar? (2010)

Book Review from the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

For All the Tea in China. By Sarah Rose (Arrow Books)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the British Empire, via the East India Company, made vast fortunes from selling opium to China and buying tea from China with part of the proceeds (the tea was then re-sold in Britain at much higher prices). All attempts to grow good-quality tea outside China had failed, though it was realised that doing so would lead to even greater profits. The ruling Qing dynasty made sure that the secrets of tea were not exported outside China.

Discovering new plants and crops was an important aspect of the British Empire. Botanists sailed with Captain Cook to Australia. Nathaniel Ward had invented a kind of portable glass house, nowadays known as a terrarium, to keep plants alive without water on long voyages.

In 1848 the East India Company employed Robert Fortune – yes, that really was his name – to travel to China and obtain (i.e. steal) tea plants and seeds, together with knowledge of how to cultivate them, and bring them back to Calcutta and the Himalayas. After many vicissitudes – attempts to transport plants were unsuccessful – Fortune was eventually able to transplant seeds in Ward’s cases. Then in 1851 he persuaded a number of Chinese experts to work in India and give advice on how to plant and irrigate tea and how the Indian workers should cultivate it. As Rose says, all this was pure industrial espionage, ‘the greatest theft of protected trade secrets that the world has ever known’.

The Chinese monopoly on tea was broken, and it would now be spread to Ceylon, Kenya and so on, to the immense profit of those who ran the British Empire. In addition, it increased the demand for sugar, hence the colonisation of the Caribbean, and led to improvements in sailing boats and the development of the tea clipper. And of course it had an enormous impact on daily life in Britain.
Rose’s book is mostly a rather over-dramatised popular history, but also makes some useful points about the consequences of Fortune’s plundering of the secrets of tea and its relation to the spread of empire and the development of capitalism.

Paul Bennett