Almost two-hundred years ago, South Indian men and women were brought to Sri Lanka to work on tea plantations that required extensive human labour. Under their colonial rule, the British brought these workers against their will to undertake the task of handpicking tea leaves and buds from the bushes in order to get a viable harvest. These leaves are then sent through a journey of being dried, rolled, and aerated, to give most of us our morning cup.
One of Sri Lanka’s most significant export commodities is tea, still known to the world as Ceylon Tea, which has been a keystone of the Sri Lankan economy for a significant period of time. Although tea is widely celebrated, the harsh reality behind the industry casts a long shadow over its reputation.
The workers of the estates have been facing systemic exploitation, discrimination, and marginalisation since the day they were brought into the country.
Last week a public seminar was organised by the non-profit Australian Advocacy for Good Governance in Sri Lanka (AAGGSL), titled Behind the Cup of Tea: The Exploitation of Malaiyaha Labour in Sri Lanka. The keynote speaker was Menaha Kandasamy, notably the first-ever female trade union leader in Sri Lanka’s plantation sector, who has taken steps to reform the predominantly male-dominated field of plantation labour unions.
Kandasamy is the daughter of a tea plucker, having grown up on plantations and eventually joining the workforce herself. She began her union work in 2009 and became the first female General Secretary of a plantation union in 2012. Since then, she has been lobbying for further rights and improved living conditions for the estate workers who continue to live in misery.
She successfully transformed the Ceylon Plantation Workers’ Union into a more representative force, expressly supportive of women’s rights. Her advocacy stems from the belief that the first and foremost necessity is to strengthen and organise the workers.
According to Kandasamy, the root of the problem lies in the extreme poverty they suffer from, which makes them especially vulnerable to corporate exploitation aimed at reducing labour costs. Tragically, their economic conditions have remained unchanged for two centuries.
Shedding light on the current system, Kandasamy said that the Kangani system is essentially a strict form of debt bondage.
“Workers are recruited and managed under exploitative conditions with little regard for their well-being. Derived from the British Colonial model, this aimed to entrench racial and class hierarchies, establishing a food chain within the labour system which, pitifully, seems to be in force even today,” she said. According to her, this system breeds a cycle of dependence and isolation, alienating Malaiyaha workers from the rest of the country. She said the workers inevitably then face countless issues such as poor healthcare, restricted access to resources, lack of job security, lower wages for higher workloads, and many more.
“The livelihood of these workers is nominally protected by industrial laws, and the 2003 Citizenship Act granted them legal citizenship, securing their place in the country to a limited extent. Even this was something that reached them much later. Owing to the Citizenship Act 1984, many of these workers were once stateless; a plight ignored by the successive governments, up until the year 2003. However, this legal recognition has not translated into material improvements,” she said.
Kandasamy also provided some context to the current status quo, by drawing on their recent past as estate workers. She said that at one point, companies engaged in tea exports refused to sign a collective agreement to increase estate workers’ wages by a mere Rs. 200.
“Without such agreements, which govern sector-specific laws like tea leaf quotas and payment rates, corporations operate without accountability. After 2019, companies also stopped deducting union subscriptions from workers’ wages, further weakening the trade unions. To this day, no agreement has been reached to regulate these conditions,” she added.
The keynote speech clarified how the lack of a formal agreement has now become a political tool with politicians routinely making promises to gain votes from the Hill Country community, only to abandon those promises once elected.
“To the privileged, Rs. 1,350 might seem an insignificant amount, just short of indulging in luxuries. For the Malaiyaha labourers however, that monthly wage is their only anchor for survival. This is so, while Sri Lanka earned an approximate 371 million USD as export revenue during the 1st Quarter of 2025,” she said.
“A family of five is expected to live on Rs. 1,350 a month, making three daily meals a luxury, let alone access to medical care or basic necessities. Free education offers some hope; children of plantation workers do get enrolled in school. However, due to weak child labour laws and the need for extra income, these children drop out and join their parents on the hills,” Kandasamy said.
She also said that the exploitation by companies also includes the casualisation of work where under this system, workers are denied EPF, ETF, maternity benefits, and other compensation. “They are lured in under the false promise of a dual system, where casual and paid work are combined, only to be trapped into worse conditions. Desperate times force them to accept these terms without resistance,” she said.
According to her, the Government must share responsibility for the situation as well. Kandasamy along with other speakers at the event highlighted that after the plantation sector was privatised in 1992–1993, private companies took over management while the State retained land ownership. Yet the labour laws remain too weak to protect the workers. They noted this exploitation isn’t isolated to the Central Province. In the South, newly established tea estates subject workers to similar or worse conditions.
She said that often pregnant women who cannot pluck tea for three weeks are dismissed from work. This issue reached the Workers’ Tribunal in June 2024, with 12 workers providing testimony. Kandasamy explained how one woman described her living conditions, adding that their houses are so cramped that she must ask her husband to leave the house whenever her daughters need to change clothes, forcing him to wait outside regardless of the weather.
Other experts providing inputs described the plight of the Malaiyaha community as a form of modern slavery, a reality worsened by persisting ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka. As Lionel Bopage said during the seminar, “This is the time to learn and the time to act”. We would be at fault for allowing such conditions to persist, knowing the toll it takes on human lives. All for your cup of morning brew.
