Siliguri: Tea in limbo after minimum wage meeting

The minimum wage rate is still missing for over three lakh workers in the state’s tea industry as the 18th meeting of the Minimum Wage Advisory Committee, constituted by the state government nine years ago, took no decision on the issue on Tuesday. A tea worker in Bengal gets a wage of Rs 250 per day. The daily wage was revised last year by the state government. As soon as the state advised to increase the daily wage from Rs 232 to Rs 250, a section of tea garden owners moved the Calcutta High Court against it. The high court heard the case in August 2023 and said that the planters cannot question the authority of the state government. Along with this, the court also directed the state government to expedite the process of finalizing the minimum wage rate for tea workers and gave six months time for this work. Acting on the court order, the state labor department held a meeting at Shramik Bhawan, an office of the department, here in Siliguri on Tuesday. State Labor Minister Moloy Ghatak along with members of the advisory committee were present in the meeting. “We discussed many issues. It has been decided that another meeting will be held on January 30. This is because the Calcutta High Court had issued an order to fix the minimum wage within six months. During this period, some documents on this issue will be circulated among the members of the advisory committee and we hope that they will come up with appropriate inputs that can help us in fixing the wage rate,” said Minister Ghatak after the meeting. Mani Kumar Darnal, convener of the Joint Forum, a common platform of 28 tea trade unions, said he said the total daily wage (cash component and fringe benefits) should be Rs 600. “We have presented a proposed minimum wage structure and are confident the state will act on it,” Darnall said. Representatives of trade unions and tea planters’ associations said that once the minimum wage is fixed, it should be implemented on the small tea sector also. “Once the minimum wage is fixed, it should be applicable to tea gardens, small tea gardens as well as bought-leaf factories,” a source said.