Gender and Plantation Labour in Africa: The Story of Tea Pluckers� Struggles in Cameroon

Chapter 4. Management of female workers

75 4 Management of female workers Introduction Tea plucking is labour-intensive. The establishment of managerial control over the labour process is, therefore, essential for an increase in productivity and the quality of work. According to Friedland et al. (1981: 8), the labour process should be conceived not simply as the physical organisation of work but as the meeting ground of the two major social categories: wage labour and capital .... The relationship between workers and owners/managers pivots on the production of value by one category (labour) and the appropriation of that value by the other category (capital). The existence of exploitative relations of production in the labour process poses the problem of control. The management can only appropriate and maximise the surplus value produced by labour by subordinating workers to its authority over the labour process and intensifying their labour productivity. In the first section of this chapter I shall briefly describe the physical organisation of work on the estate. In the second section I shall outline the most important strategies employed by management and the state to establish control over female pluckers. I shall argue that control over the labour process involves a new form of gender subordination: the giving of orders is mainly a male prerogative while the role of women is defined as the carrying out of orders. 76 Gender and Plantation Labour in Africa The physical organisation of production Tea is a crop which requires labour inputs all year round. Tasks in the field are the most labour-intensive, and the most important operations are: • Planting. Tea is a perennial crop with a productive life of more than 50 years. The quality of seedlings is of decisive importance for the total returns a tea estate aims to generate. The traditional source for the Cameroonian estates were seedlings grown in nurseries and transplanted when they were between 1.5 and 2 years old. At present a new procedure is being applied. This involves the large-scale multiplication of vegetatively propagated (VP) clones from mother bushes selected on the basis of yield capacity and other important characteristics (Eden 1965; Gyllström 1977). It has been shown that such VP cuttings have given two to three times greater yields than those obtained from seedlings. On the CDC estates the bushes are planted together, making it possible to create a flat, raised surface at the top of the bushes, often called the ‘plucking table’. Output starts three years after planting and full maturity is achieved after 5 to 7 years, depending on planting material. • Maintenance. This includes weeding, fertiliser application, and pruning. At present weeding is usually done by applying chemicals. Weeding requirements are virtually eliminated when a dense plucking table has been established. Pruning of the tea bushes has to be done regularly so as to maintain the yields and keep the plucking table at a manageable height. It is a tedious and delicate job which is carried out by experienced workers. • Plucking. The most labour-intensive and most important task on the estate is the plucking of the flush, or the immature leaf, that appears on the bush. The amount of flush depends on the variety of the bush (whether it is high-yielding, as in the case of the vegetative propagation variety, or the normal tea seedling with a lower yield). Whatever the nature of the bush, however, the yield at 77 Chapter 4: Management of Female workers any particular time is also influenced by the level of rainfall. Thus there are seasonal variations in the flush, and corresponding shifts in the demand for plucking labour. On the tea estates in Cameroon, there are two peak seasons and two slack periods of tea plucking. The two peak periods are: AprilJuly and October-December. The slack periods are: December-April (coinciding with the dry season) and July-October (the period of heavy rains). During the peak seasons top pluckers can pluck more than double the daily norm and, consequently, earn incomes well above the basic wage. During the slack periods, however, many pluckers experience great difficulties in completing the daily task (and earning at least the basic wage) (see Chapter 3). There are many systems of plucking (Kurian 1989: 302). The most common systems in use on the tea estates in Cameroon are fine and coarse plucking. Fine plucking refers to picking only the top two leaves and the bud. A coarse pick takes in...