[AUTHOR]
Jark SS. Krysinski. "Capital Exploits and Prerogatives: Women’s Labour and Bodies in the World Tea Affair." Simon Fraser University.

[TEASER FOR ARTICLE]
The controversy in this paper is that the number #1 consumed beverage in the world -- namely Tea -- is wrought with the most conflicting human rights issues. The central thesis in this paper implies that the power of cheap female labor (already classed, raced, gendered) serves as a differential equation for super-profit schemes, serving the major obsession of the Plantocracy of the tea estates around the world. This contrasts sharply from the elitist Western Tea shops charging 7$ for a pot of tea whilst the daily wage of a tea picker is merely a fraction of that!

[INDEX]
I N D E X___________________________________
INTRODUCTION
[Preface & Limits: Theory]
[THESIS]
[BODY]
[Origins of Concepts, Definitions, Dates]
[Argument & Theory]
[Framing & Defining the “Picker”]
[Capital Foundations]
[Capital vs./over LABOUR hierarchy]
[Class/Group Consciousness]
[Gender Divisions]
[Capital Cost-Analysis: Labor Costs]
[“Double” Burded]
[Living Conditions]
[Capital DE-valuation of Health]
[CONCLUSION]
[REFERENCES]
___________________________________________

[BODY OF ARTICLE]
INTRODUCTION
[Preface & Limits]
Can it be possible for someone in the west—albeit an immigrant like myself —to even comprehend, or make a knowledge claim about, the life of a woman tea picker (or plucker, tipper, worker) on any of the world’s tea plantations in the south-east? Can a westerner conceive what it must be like to withhold ones labor (Shameen, 61) as the only kind of protest against ones circumstances, where one’s labor is one’s only representation? Alternatively, how possible is It to comprehend that tea pickers pick tea because it is ‘better than nothing’ as no other job is available to them, who “are so extremely poor and are willing to take up the tea garden jobs”(Reddock, 9). Could it be possible to understand how it must feel, to live and work in conditions where some working shifts are indeed one day long, and the supervision that is around the female tea pickers “ensures that they take the shortest possible time to eat their lunch”(Chatterjee, 192). I think that it is perhaps possible to try to imagine, but not to know, to empathize, having not had such experiences. As such, this text is always already bound by the ignorance, privilege, and limitations of research as such, and the analysis of a very very privileged and voyeuristic position that an academic paper requires, and an ignorance that is an effect of building a singular argument to prove my point, discarding all other useful data that don’t suit that purpose. Intimate to this paper is the idea, as Mohanty suggests in our course readings, that it is almost impossible for a western discourse to imagine and articulate the reality of the “third world,” or the life of someone on a tea plantation. This impossibility is structurally maintained due to the inflicting position of demand the west has on the lives of those who supply the work inherent in the product: tea. At the end of this paper it will be clear what kind of exploitative and capital interests maintain and reinforce the working and living conditions of the famale plantation worker—in terms of colonialism, geography, gender, and class, and capital—from the moment of the establishment of the plantation to the moment of maintaining the industry of such a project for capital gain, today.

[THESIS]
Accordingly, it must be understood in the west, that Tea can not be grown here primarily because the “labour costs would make the product prohibitively expensive”(Hardy, 18) suggesting that the tea business is what it is primarily thanks to cheap labor which allow for tea production elsewhere. For the pragmatic reasons, then, as an assignment proper, my subject position aims, very humbly, to think about, and to fulfil this ambitious project of trying to speak about (1) a situation I have only read about and have not lived, and (2) about a place that is economically deemed to be abroad. To limit that discussion I will focus on the Sri Lankan tea plantations, as a convenient representations of tea plantations in general. To start, my thesis stems from the prime idea that: the “’plantation’ [must be] defined as a total economic institution in which the entire existence of the workforce was incorporated into the process of production and reproduction”(Reddock, 5) with the needs/aims of global (read: Western) and industrial capitalism. From Mohanty’s position, and commensurate with the research on this subject, it is necessary to have the following thesis: That a western imagination (despite its diversity, but because of its privilege) is inherently incapable of understanding the life experience(s) of—and its effects on—the tea plantation women, not only because it does not experience that life, but because it perpetuates that life through its needs, wants, and economic demands; and secondly, because to understand that experience would be to reflect on and accept the capital systems’ dependency on exploitation of women’s labor. And thus, to think about the tea plantation is to explore the strict relation between the capital domain extending itself on the (working) lives of tea pickers. In such a relation—a relation that will have to be rethought and restated a few times throughout this paper, as the argument falls into place, and as it evolves —tea plantations “obtain capital investment from corporation-type entities which gauge the level of their investment on the basis of maximum returns on capital advanced”(Reddock, 8). In short, a reflection or understanding of the women’s plantation experience is contingent on a virtual escape of the needs and the preconditions to the needs of the western tea consumer(s), and is limited by the assumptions in those needs, the vicious requirements to exploit, that are in some ways inherent in living in the west. Living and consuming in the west is necessarily in line—and according to—its privilege as the capital holder, the consumer, the exploiter.

[Origins of Concepts]
The word plantation has its origin, as is traced by our popular dictionaries, to 1569. It is to mean “1. A usually large group of plants…under cultivation; 2. A settlement in a new country or region; 3. a. a place that is planted or under cultivation, [and, more importantly for our discussion] b. an agricultural estate usually worked by resident labor”(Merriam-Webster Dictionary, emphases added). The working and living conditions on such plantations both imply similar structural oppressions of the female worker: the range of activities both in and out of the home exploit her, as you will see below. It is also possible and necessary to connote colonialism and capitalism with the term plantation, particularly in the emphasized definition. Throughout millennia: “tea cultivation and tea manufacturing methods in the major tea estate countries have remained largely unchanged”(Campbell, 61), and thus it is emphasized that very very delicate work is done exclusively by women. This group of “careful persons” (women) were hired to dig the ground, sow the seeds, enrich the ground with manure & soil, and water the ground. They then carefully pluck the delicate tea-leaves, “lest the branches of the plant should be torn, or the leaves injured”(Scott, 26), at the expense of their hands. These women workers are also called “dedicated tea estate laborers”(Campbell, 62), for reasons which will be clear below. It is such a colonial outlook that, as a western gesture, is of necessity exclusive of the experience of the colonized—the ones who work on those estates—since to colonize is to settle on, it is to inherently subjugate the other(s), is to first and foremost have motives. It is not without motive that the woman tea picker lives the life she does—perhaps that could be a super-brief version of this thesis. Here is my context. Thousands of tea estates exist in over thirty-five countries in the world (Campbell, 73), evident with and in such a disparity of literature about women’s labor in these plantations (in documents or otherwise), a story of this labor must be pieced together from what is (un-) available because what is said often reveals what is not said (or written) at all. The totality of research on the tea plantation system hasn’t even addressed all these places, they are perhaps too numerous to document.

[Argument & Theory]
My thesis implies as follows. To put crudely and simply, the capital system takes as a necessary condition for its operation the availability/presence of an exploitable body of labor. So, resulting from above, the central thesis in this paper implies that the power of cheap female labor (already classed, raced, gendered ) serves as a differential equation for super-profit schemes of millions of dollars, and this scheme for capital is the major obsession of the Plantocracy of the tea estates around the world. The grand-scale of such an industry is precisely so impossible to imagine, since the grand-scale of such an operation is invisible to the sheltered western eye. To put another way, the economics of the tea plantation (in the form of foreign capital from the North and/or West) translate into principles of oppression according to principles of Colonialism and Capitalism and therefore enforce a labor exploit in that system of colony—particularly where goods are produced with exports (not local subsistence) in mind (capital going to the North and/or West). But there is more to it, it’s important to think about this a little deeper. The thesis I posit is realized further when capital evidently, of necessity, excludes humanist tendencies, or excludes humanist considerations so long as it is profitable or, conversely, until it becomes profitable to include them. So where does my thesis lead. One effect of this thesis leads the reader to realize that the plantation system—including factories, land, the workers, their marriages, their living conditions, their reproduction, and so on—are part and parcel of the system of production: “the traditional plantation was defined as a total economic institution in which the entire existence of the workforce was incorporated into the process of production…”(Jain & Reddock, 5). This direct relation between survival for the (exclusive) purpose of production is startling. A startling effect of capital is noted when ones notes that “the common pattern on estates is for a male member (normally husband, elder brother, father) to collect the wages for all the working members of the family”(Kurian, 83), since the women are arguably too busy working to collect their own wages, and are deemed too illiterate and vulnerable to be cheated by plantation management. I centralize female labor in my thesis since this labor is most exploited on the tea plantation, in more ways than one, as will be shown below. The plantation is a location of cheap labor for the extraction of goods, and therefore value, to the local but mostly to the western markets: the primary consumer of thousands of kilos of tea.

[Framing the Picker]
So, how do the numbers fare? The numbers speak for themselves where, for instance, an estimated 3,000,000 women work on tea plantations worldwide - often called “harvesters,” “pluckers,” “pickers,” “tea workers,” and “semi-skilled or unskilled” workers, or “virile pickers,” with “dexterity of the fingers,” or with “nimble fingers,” who are real women who are said to be “naturally more docile,” and thus become the “laboring masses”. This number further represents—and I will only touch on this briefly—a negated work-force, that can only exist in such number due to the significance of their work coupled with the minimized remuneration of that work. A sharp financian reality, for example, is that a good part of the received pay is in coupons, in place of money, since it is seen that these coupons will be used in the colony (read: plantation town) to purchase/exchange for goods/services: “small change is given in the form of coupons that can be used in the market, another reminder of colonial customs where workers were paid with money that could not be used outside the plantation”(Chatterjee, 187). Before the pay is calculated, however, the commensurate weight of all her tea picking is added up, and an estimated kilo or two are taken off each day for the assessed and assumed weight of her picking cloth and sheets—“the face of the scale is turned away from the women wearily falling into line”(Chatterjee, 190)—such necessary secrecy leaves her in the dark as to the exact weight, as well as her ultimate pay for that day, week, month, season, and therefore year . But, in that system, her needs are met last, since the man picks up her pay, and “because the man and the children are given priority, and generally secure the most and the better food, the woman’s general health and nutritional standards deteriorate most”(Kurian, 75). The tea picker is too busy, working, to meet her own and her group’s sustenance needs.

[Capital Foundations]
So, what we are first and foremost talking about here when we say work is namely the access to an exploitable resource, namely women’s work on the plantation, is to say that it is first and foremost useful to capital markets and she is therefore subjugated by that market, and has been for centuries. And, as Mohanty suggests in Under Western Eyes…Colonial Discourses, western discourses on equality cannot often imagine the living and working standards of the third world, due to the western assumption of the “normative referent” or constant in such an analysis. Thus the category of female labor, specifically, is a necessary category of analysis since it will be shown that it is the most valuable asset to the tea industry: her cultural, economic, physical, and gender position frame her unique in this context—she lives in the third world, she is poor, she is seen as possessing useful qualities for picking tea, and she is a woman who is not valued as much by her culture. The condition of these women’s paid, unpaid, and underpaid work will also be discussed within, and relegated by, the capitalist context—namely that the position of the woman tea picker is exploited by vastly large global interests. The term production by implication includes the labor of women from the plantation processes to the manufacturing processes, the way her labor is directly used for plucking and the way in which that labor is mis-remunerated in that context.

[CAPITAL vs. LABOUR hierarchy]
Accordingly, in the East, women’s work is done on men’s plantations—for instance where Thomas Lipton buys tea plantations in Ceylon and employed tea pickers—and are therefore framed by his interests. The analytic of my thesis must inherently include a gendered exploiter, the male ownership as inherently exploitative of and capitalizing of the main female labor useful to it. The flocks of tea pickers on the plantation represent to the owners the largest group of worker who, with “little skills but their naturally nimble hands,” harvest the tea. These women are merely bodies, cheap labor. The thesis of inherent disparities between capital value and the value of the living worker are evident: “profit, productivity, and efficiency…when these bodies are racialized and gendered within the intricate hierarchies…of labor”(Chatterjee, 171), and the power-dynamic of capital-over-worker is revealed. So pronounced is the need for exploitable “nimble” labor, that the tea industry constantly employs up to 500,000 children in the tea trade—these are of course un-official figures since they are published on the internet by NGO’s and not in libraries or in periodicals—to get them started plucking tea and, unofficially and therefore without any acknowledgment, to get them to help the women to do their labor on the fields on high quota days of 100 kilos, a quota impossible to reach (http://www.oneworld.org/ips2/dec/sr...). According with my thesis, because tea plantations are commercial undertakings, and are concerned with the profit margin after all, they are unable to consider what the capitalist isn’t designed to: “they are not inclined to give top priority to welfare provisions for workers” meaning that they are unwilling and/or cannot consider the welfare of the huge labor force which they access at grossly undervalued and underestimated rates. Human variables are inherently not part of the capital project, until they can in themselves be converted into capitalizable quantities.

[CLASS/GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS]
The popular view in my research findings is that the majority of tea pluckers, who are a diversity of women from hundreds of tea plantations worldwide, lack solidarity and are unaware of each other as a group: “The sense of community is often weak. Even the field workers, who are divided by ethnic origin, housing blocks, castes, family, gender, age, …lack a sense of unity—of being a group with collective interests” . The majority of these workers are obviously women, but does that suggest that women lack the conception of themselves as a group, a labor force, a collective. I think something needs to be said against this proposed view, by way of its assumptions of homogeneity. The popularity of the view that women in the tea industry are largely docile and acquiesce to the oppression dealt them is necessarily stifled by the structural reality of her labor position, such that her employment already frames her, together with other women like her, into that work on the plantation. Whether a group consciousness exists is second to what possibilities are available to the group, before or after it recognized the limits dealt it. So, I argue that it would be unreasonable to assume that a kind of class-consciousness does not exist among women on the tea plantation, since they seem to realize that they are a group of tea pickers—who shall likely remain tea pickers—whose labor is used/exploited by the tea plantation. I would argue that they recognize their skill as tea pickers, as a skill that is exploitable by the industry and, based on that logic, and should they comprise a limited resource they would be willing to network together as a group to mobilize some form of change, however small (Safa, 1979: 443). Albeit, such organization is always already contained with the structural bounds availed her, which are the limits and extensions availed to the woman tea picker par excellence. Especially when these limits are availed to the tea picker’s who are readily available for the job, as Yoon suggests in our class reading, citing the extreme unemployment rate in China (Yoon, 2001). Such a concept would inherently confine her to the only (or very few at best) labor positions available to her, while allowing her (and the female tea workers as a group) to posit reasonable estimates of their labor, arguments against their oppression, and the gender discrimination the face especially relative to their male counterparts. At the same time, however, the reality of a lot of their lives is such that the tea picker women do realize and know that to pick tea and to live according to that labor as their sole source of possible income, and is their life: “But if you want a story of tea, tell whomever you tell this that this is our life: in sun, in rain, we do this”(Chatterjee, 185). To compound that reality, it is important to remember that their concern for the work, and the struggles there, are only a part of their worries, since “even when they are full-time wage workers, women [like those who are married and/or have children, or other dependents] continue to assume responsibility for household tasks”(Konings, 7) among other responsibilities. (I will expand on the double-burden below). I would suggest, that for the westerner to imagine or argue for a class consciousness on the tea plantation, s/he must realize that such concerns for class are, in this case, further tied to concepts of kinship- and group- relationships, differences between married and unmarried women, castes, language groups, region of the villages relative to other villages, among other complex relations. And also, as Mohanty can be seen to suggest, the westerner must understand that for a female tea picker, or a group thereof, to respond to the violence wrought against them by the capital plantocracy, its patriarchy, and its other systems of oppression, there must first off exist a discourse. I think that currently there is no public discourse on the violence against women in the plantation villages, particularly held by women as a group, that group conception still hasn’t formed , particularly by the differences within the group.

[GENDER DIVISIONS]
A good reason for networking, and organizing, could be in the realm of promotion opportunities for women. It is found that “they are given hardly any opportunity for promotion” while it is recognized that women, as a group, are “believed to be more efficient pluckers than men” . Thus it is evident that capital wants only one position for women, the one where they are most valuable to it, as far as it can tell. Thus capital pins women as a group into the realm/work of pluckers. This begins with young girls who “usually start plucking for wages from the age of ten or twelve, and their capacity for plucking increases as they get older, becoming in most cases, ‘class’ pluckers between twenty and thirty years of age”(Kurian, 70). The possibility of promotion is based on (1) the “lateral mobility” of the male worker and (2) the fields of work “not open to women” even though their physical work is just as demanding as that attributed as man’s work on the plantation, especially when “work done by women in the hoeing and clearing of tea bush aisles”(Chatterjee, 209) is just a demanding as anything else on the farm. Paradoxically, and to top it off, men are also found working in the offices as assistants and so on, further contradicting the male-stereotype of physical labor and the supposed gender division of labor on the plantation (Chatterjee, 210). (This gender-role surprisingly contrasts dozens of stereotypes about her abilities and suitabilities in the working world generally, or on the tea plantation particularly. ) The lack of promotion can be linked to the assumption that women with a lot of experience in plucking tea are considered the best pluckers—thus the female tea picker is kept at a static level of employment because she, like a self-improving machine, is growing in value for the enterprise: “good pluckers have over 20 years of experience and their age is seen as a helpful attribute. Thus her position as tea picker is re-enforced with this justification” . The lack of promotion can also be attributed, according to the economists, the extremely high percentage of labor costs constituting the largest single cost of production, as I mentioned above: “On the cost front, two elements are crucial in the tea industry—labour wages and estate supplies. The former accounts for 50-55 per cent of the cost of production and the latter about 25 per cent” .

[CAPITAL COST-ANALYSIS: LABOR COSTS]
The most expensive cost the tea industry has is the labour costs, which are already reduced based on calculations of how much is absolutely necessary for the sustenance or sheer survival of the tea picker, or the tea plantation village, and smaller family groups. As my thesis implies, then, the worker group on the plantation “live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital”(Marx, Communist Manifesto), so the economy in the survival and maintenance of the workers is part of the equation of capital success/gain. Economically, but inherently rhetorically, these non-promotions are seen as effects of the declining tea prices in auctions worldwide which, while individual plantations constantly try to increase and maximize the picking done by women, are a constant down trend in the past ten years, trying to capture more demands worldwide for the marketing of tea evermore. In addition to the already low wages, companies try to pass incentives for picking/plucking more tea, but these incentives merely reflect that growing disparity between the company’s gain while further lowering the woman’s earned wage, further revealing that the “rate of incentive was not attractive to the worker” especially when relative to the increase of harvesting/picking, showing a slower rate of payment in contrast to the increase in yield. Another version of exploitation is “evident from the calculations that all management would stand to gain from the proposed incentive system,” a system which gives fewer incentive (if that name of correct) to the extra work done by the woman. This form of oppression of woman’s labor will extend into other aspects of tea harvesting, meaning that the labor of the tea plantations labor force will be further decimated for capital priorities—as predicated by capital, and as evident in the thesis.

[“DOUBLE”-BURDEN]
Gendered labor segregation on the plantations stems from the stipulation that tea “plucking” is women’s work, as defined in paragraph 3 above, contrasted sharply in that the men’s work on the tea plantation often ends by noon or “within the stipulated [total] hours of work” leaving the men with an unburdened day. These men are paid the same as the women: “Men working on the estate do not pluck tea (considered women's work), but instead prepare the land, apply fertilizer, spray pesticides, prune, work in the factory, act as drivers, or are field supervisors of groups of pluckers. Most of this work is done in the morning and after lunch men are free” . Thus, I briefly note that “the jobs in which women are concentrated…are time jobs. The jobs done by the male workers…are generally piece-rate jobs”(Kurian, 71) but the latter are better remunerated than the quantitatively and timely lengthier female labor . The thesis I propose only partially applies to the male work-force on the tea plantation context, since their exploitation is evidently not the same in this context—they are the supervisors, the managers, they comprise the watch-gangs, and hold ultimate value and (e)valuation (and power over) the women’s work. The men who work on plantations are largely unsupervised and enjoy lengthy lunches furthest away from the plantation center, often with their overseers, thereby emphasizing another sharp valuation of women’s labor. This contrast is well presented by Chatterjee: “In contrast to the surveillance of women during peak harvest, the supervision of men is muted. The lunch pause at II:00 A.M. is not broken by the overseer’s edgy call to quickly resume work [as they constantly do to the women]. So relaxed is this break that men bathe with water from the larger water truck parked nearby. Overseers will eat their own lunches with the men [instead of supervising them]” showing that “men’s camaraderie cuts across the hierarchy”(Chatterjee, 208) of authority on the plantation. The double-burden of employment and domestic work still exists, as the domestic labor is often not shared—for instance: “Her official workday ends at 4:30 p.m…. Then begins her home chores: cooking, cleaning, washing up and attending to the needs of her husband and children”(Samath, online).

[LIVING CONDITIONS]
Now the thesis is even further confirmed, particularly when the qualitative realm of living-conditions is explored. In this realm women are most affected. First of all, as I will opine, the illusion of quantitative and qualitative justice in substandard employment practices—often used in justifying arguments about labor in the third world—suggesting that cheap labor is justifiable since these people are obviously thankful for what they are doing, which obviously centers survival as the primary interest of the third-world laborer, extremely contrasts the capital-gain intent of the plantation owner. A discourse of survival, then, stands in extreme contrast to the discourse of capital gain, earnings, success. So it is obvious that the dominance of the latter create the requirements for the former. I will exemplify this as follows with examples from Sri Lankan tea plantations, where the living standards, location, and resources (housing, shopping, communities, and other resources) are provided by the enterprise or plantation system (plantocracy)—it is seen as a form (or portion) of payment the plantations’ women workers receive: “the plantations do not just offer employment, they are also responsible for providing housing, water, welfare and many [often in-operational] facilities that affect the daily lives of workers”. But the shocking reality of these provisions should be explored. As Kurian describes Sri Lankan plantations, we learn that “the workers live in ‘line rooms, barrack like structures with one room allotted to each family…the predominant feature of these ‘lines’ is lack of adequate space, leading to serious problems of overcrowding”(Kurian, 69). These conditions could best be described as “plantations workers [who] mostly still live packed together in primitive barrack settlements, put up over a hundred years ago”(Project SL67), tracing the original colonizing process in such regions. A lot of these homes are made of thatch and mud, an age-old construction by any standards—but a construction which cannot cater to western standards in the least. In times of economic crisis then—say when the west tries to limit the prices of tea as a commodity in its commodities markets —it is the woman who “bears the brunt of it because work, [both on the plantation] and in the household, and subsidizes the fall in income…,” especially should groups members (husband, brother(s), father, children) get ill. Yet illness haunts but cannot stop the woman tea picker, even though her labor is plagued by pesticides, which cause sores and other deformities on her body, while they kill the plant itself after overexposure—these bio-technological effects on the woman’s body are rarely addressed by the plantation, rarely understood by the workers, and remind us of the capital formula where the labor (and protection of it) is maintained so long as it is profitable. So, not just pesticide exposure, but conditions of public latrines among a dozen (sometimes even more) of homes suggests that the capital equation does not see equitable reason for higher standards of sanitation. For example, there are too few access points to water latrines in the tea-plantation villages, and the living “quarters” are rather substandard because the homes available to plantation workers are often based on (or basically are still the original) the British Colonizers’ standards, and the living arrangements are a product of colonialism and its low estimate for and of locals standard of living. Let’s pause and just consider the impacts of such conditions on the female body. Accordingly, such conditions impact women, resulting in diarrhea, malaria, intestinal worm infections, pneumonia, dysentery, measles, all primarily caused by low sanitation in the domestic realm (Konings, 47-48).

[CAPITAL DE-VALUATION OF HEALTH]
The health levels of women on plantations cannot be dissociated from working conditions on the public and private level or from living conditions and, therefore, cannot be dissociated from the conditions on the plantations as a whole and, furthermore, cannot be dissociated form the value the plantation management place on health and healthy labor. These three variables (1) current health of tea plantation residents are relative to their (2) working and living conditions because they are relative to (3) the capital value placed on health by the managers, owners, supervisors, and exporters on (and off) the tea plantations. In short, “. So if we were to return to the thesis, it would be correct to say that the capitalist calculations have concluded that it is cheaper economically to have healthy workers because, and only because it means higher productivity of the labor force. It becomes a capital issue to posit a humanist issue—the latter has become co-opted by the former. Thus cheap measures have been setup to institute anti-anemia plans, such as iron supplements such that the labor force can be kept at a minimum health-level to maintain high(er) labor productivity. Namely, “even from the standpoint of purely commercial considerations, therefore, there is a convergence between the health and welfare of workers and the interests of management. Better health leads to higher labour productivity” - thus, an essentialist and preventative approach is taken with the explicit aim of sustainable productivity. Therefore it is reasonable to decipher such utilitarian formulas as the (1) maintenance of a minimum health standard which directly result in (2) increased productivity and ultimately (3) a reduction of costs to management. A utilitarian formula that allows the least input to maintain the highest output. Here capital consideration of human health and well-being, ultimately serves its interests—it is that prime aim that should be emphasized, despite the gain to human health. In theory, an assumption about normalcy is proposed, whereby a minimum, adequate, normal health concept is setup so as to further the capital market gain of the tea industry of that given plantation. Normative measures such as average body weight have been taken as estimate measures to ensure the productivity of the workers, where the proper (essentialist) weight of the worker, serves as a generic and all-inclusive indicator of her health: “It was observed that 66 per cent of the women weighed less than 45 kg. By and large, weight can be taken as an indicator of health and nutrition, pertaining to a more recent period, than height.” The exact impact of this sort of normative analytic would be impossible to calculate—but it suffices that difference(s), context, and other variables such as particular ailments, case histories, individual problems and the like, are seen as eliminate-able by generic, all-inclusive measures.

[CONCLUSION]
According to my thesis it is clear that capital has usurped its most valuable tea production resource, woman’s labor. This has taken place through the colonialist project of colonizing the tea-growing regions worldwide, and allowing for these relics of colonialism to permeate into the living systems, productions systems, and capital systems of these regions, going as far back as 1569. It is fairly reasonable to posit that capital exploit of such resources as tea and its prerequisite labor requirements are only second to its export needs for global consumption of this product. The “laboring masses” of 3,000,000 women, their use value, the form of remuneration, and the already pre-determined life-environment available to her, all serve as exploits. It would be correct to argue that lip-service is paid to the female labor force, women who continue to live and work in conditions, pay, and future potential that is inconceivable by western standards, that is always already framed by western ideological, gender, and capital constructs. A realm where payment in exclusively collected by the man of the family/group is indicative of ideological, gender, and capital relations on the tea plantation—this is only one example of such a relation presented in this paper. Due to the many other examples cited above, and according to my thesis of capital authority (over humanism, over woman, over classed groups, over worker, over women) in the south-asian tea plantations, it seems that there is (fundamentally) no regard for women’s right as human rights: “Though women's role in the economy and society has become more and more important, her position is still vulnerable. There is no clear and general identification and recognition of women's rights as human rights.” My western position is almost incapable, aside from this paper and my conversations about this, to imagine working on a tea plantation for all of my life, without chances, nutrition, education, time, space, latrines, and literacy, without possibilities, imagination, and without adequate representation, even in papers like this.

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