Introduction

In total, there are approximately five and a half million children in slavery today; a number that has remained the same since 2012. This is allowed to continue because child labor is cheap, accessible, and most importantly, unregulated. Children who work for a salary on Asian tea plantations earn $3.50 a day if they meet their quota; in worse conditions than cotton pickers in the 1600’s. However, children who have been sold to the tea plantations are told their salaries are being put in the bank when in reality they’re making nothing at all. “Tea Garden Children” as they are referred to in Asia, are considered the property of plantation owners, and are usually sold at such a young age they forget where they are from and even their first language. 

Due to climate change, by 2050, there will most likely be a temperature increase in Asia of 2.3 degrees celsius. This could wipe out Asia’s most productive tea plantations, with losses that will show up as early as 2020. Because the demand for tea will likely not decrease, this will create huge problems for the slaves and laborers working on these plantations. With less product to pick from, it will become much more difficult and then impossible for tea pickers to fulfill their daily quotas. For people who are paid in food and shelter, this could prove deadly (Schubert). Not only this, but with half a million people living in Asia reliant on tea farms for survival, the severe hit to the economy caused by a decrease in exports will in turn have severe consequences. While there are many ideas as to how tea can be grown to be more resilient, these will likely not come into fruition until the economy has already begun to decline. For this reason, it is incredibly important that the treatment of people working on these plantations begin improving today. 

Problem

Prisha was nearly six years old when her father took her on a trip, where she was able to ride on a bus for the first time. Her mother made her and her sisters keep their hair short so they didn’t get bugs, but she still tied a blue ribbon around her head each time she left home. They walked together through beautiful tea gardens, and he bent down to hold her small shoulders as they approached a “nice house” which was much more like a factory than a home. He steered her toward the tall man with the dead eyes, who handed him 500 rupees, or $7.70 in American dollars. Her father left, whispering that she’d have a better life this way. She didn’t. Nearly a decade later, she returned home for the first time. Her mother believed she had been killed, and her father stood silently in the corner, ashamed despite having been able to save his youngest daughter with the money he earned from selling his oldest. Prisha is one of 500,000 children who spent their childhoods living and working on an Asian Tea Plantation (Nagaraj). 

In a study performed by the International Labour Organization, a report was done on the conditions of tea plantation workers in Bangladesh. More than 84% of workers reported not making enough to support their families. More than half of plantation workers stated they were not satisfied with the sanitation of the facility and drinking water. In the case of women becoming pregnant and having young children, many were forced to keep their children with them as they picked in order to watch them without losing crucial wages. While in survey’s only 63% of workers stated their health and safety was at risk at work, 75% had suffered negative health effects as a result of their work at the plantations. This included headaches, muscle aches, and skin disease. 90% of workers reported some form of abuse my supervisors, including verbal, sexual and physical assault. Only 1% of workers admitted to being under the age of eighteen, while 50% acknowledged the existance of underaged workers on the plantations, including some management. All of these results are the reasons why a change needs to be made in the manufacturing of tea in Asian countries. 

Discussion 

The best strategy for consumers that can be used to stop child labor and slavery is to pick one product in everyday life made by children or trafficked people, and learn everything about that particular supply chain. A successful boycott lowers the price of the good being boycotted. While boycotting a particular item can still have long-term positive effects on worker conditions, it needs to be clear as to what exactly people wish to have changed. The Advance Research Journal of Multidisciplinary Discoveries recently conducted a study about the effects of global consumers participating in a boycott. Boycott’s can range from an individual giving up on using a particular item to an entire state banning an item. Surprisingly, they found that most boycott’s are inspired not by moral issues but translation errors in globalized products. When moral issues do cause a boycott, it can be picked up on very quickly, and cause a rapid decrease in demand.  

In the case of global trade, demand becomes much more spread out. Because globalization creates a much higher market demand, even a boycott of an entire state can cause only a slight decrease in demand(Yed). Even a small decrease, however, will in turn also decrease the price, allowing employers to pay employees even less. For this reason, it’s most effective to get all of the information about a particular item, and instead of just boycotting the item, insisting on a change in the company's treatment of workers. If this inspires others to boycott an item, and it becomes most financially appealing to a company to improve upon working conditions, that is the best way to make a positive difference in the world. The issue of blindly boycotting an item due to the use of slave labor is that it can cause false modifications to their process to appear like a more ethical company.

While this is a good solution for consumers, a successful boycott can mean the people who make that particular product-the children being exploited for dangerous labor-will make even less. Some of the jobs that are not quite slavery, but expose workers to terrible conditions, still may be the best paying jobs in an area. For this reason, simply boycotting an item that’s manufactured by children and slaves, can have an adverse effect(Tobia). Companies can avoid this problem by encouraging a different solution.

 In order to become a more ethical company, companies in the United States and Britain must also trade with other ethical companies. This cannot occur when the companies use child and slave labor to manufacture their product. Examples of major companies that purchase tea from Asia in bulk on a regular basis are Twinings and Tetley. With a growing demand for ethically sourced products, it becomes more and more in a given companies best interest to participate in fair trade. 

It can be very difficult to instruct companies to insist on better working conditions when the discussed working conditions are half a world away. This is especially difficult when the easiest way for producers to solve this problem is to advertise safer conditions without having to actually improve the conditions at all. It is significantly less expensive to spend a couple hundred dollars on improved advertising than hundreds of thousands on increased wages and improved plantation housing. This is worsened when people do very little research into the item they’re boycotting, and therefore can’t spot small inconsistencies that can give away an unethical manufacturing process. 

One proposed solution by Stanford Business is lean manufacturing. That is, manufacturing that stresses efficiency and responsiveness to increase production quality. This in turn then increases the quality of the work environment. In a study that attempted to make Nike’s production process more humane, Hainmueller stated that, “the results should be an eye-opener to anyone interested in addressing social and ethical issues in global supply chains”. If large companies like Twinings were to insist on using this method of manufacturing, the results could be monumental. 

Methods

Both the conditions of tea plantations and the effects of boycotts on international business are researched thoroughly in various ways. While there are not many scholarly research articles done on the conditions of tea plantations, the effects of boycotts on international business have many. 

There was a study done by Stanford Business on the concept of Lean Manufacturing which focused on eliminating waste, emphasizing flexibility, and enabling skilled workers. In this environment, workers performed many different tasks in order to ensure if one section of production was weakened, another could pick up the slack. In an environment where a lean manufacturing style was employed, “Overall, lean adoption reduced the probability of serious labor violations by 15 percent(Chipman, Stanford Business)”. Another huge impact of lean environments was a bridged gap between management and entry-level employees. This also increased their skill level for future employment, and created diversification of the economy. 

As far as why exactly this works, Stanford Business completed research on this as well. Hainmueller stated that a lean manufacturing style “kicks off a virtuous cycle where workers are expected to be more than just cogs in a machine”. This also increased overall output, which would ideally allow employers to pay workers a more livable wage. Although slave labor is cheap and easy to find, it can lead to many legal issues for companies due to having broken labor laws, which in turn equals a loss of money. For this reason, when the company begins to make more and are able to pay their workers better wages, using slave and child labor will become less appealing because of the risks associated with it. 

Conclusion and Implications

Lean manufacturing, corporation, international business, employers, management, diversifying economy. In order to encourage this kind of growth, a boycott can be used to strategically encourage companies in developing companies  

More research still needs to be done in order to test how lean manufacturing will work in developing countries. While they have tested their theories on large corporations based in the United States-such as Coca Cola-they have not done extensive research on how lean manufacturing will differ in developing countries. A major issue that has been found in this method is that in certain countries, it’s very difficult for workers to sue the company due to a lack of resources. For example, in some countries where the standard of labor is lower, it may be more difficult to convince companies to improve the conditions of workers. 

In the case of a boycott or a consumption change, trends to watch out for in the future would be a decrease in price, and a steady decrease in the supply of the item being boycotted. In this case, the product is tea sourced from Asia. Both of these outcomes would be indicators of long term success in this method of improving labor conditions and decreasing the use of slave labor. 

As far as the solution for companies to insist on the use of lean manufacturing in order to continue to trade with Asian tea plantations, there is one major trend to watch out for in the future. That is, the addition of a Free Trade logo on the product meaning the plantation has been certified in providing employees livable wages and fair working conditions. 

Works Cited

Ahmmed, Faisal PhD. “Study Report on Tea Plantation Workers”. 2016. International Labour 

Organization. Accessed 29 November 2019. 

Anwar, Yed. “Consumer Boycotts in International Marketing: A multidisciplinary Assessment 

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 “Challenges of International Business”. Jan 2017. HULT Business School. Accessed 20 

November 2019.

Guilbert, Kieran. “Exclusive: Expose of labor abuse brews trouble for 'slave-free' Indian tea”. 

May 30, 2018. Reuters. Accessed 20 November 2019.

Holtin, Elizabeth. “Ending Modern Slavery: How America is Working to Stop Human 

Trafficking”. 31 July, 2017. US Global Leadership Coalition. Accessed 29 November 2019.

Nagaraj, Anuradha. “This Child Slave Was Sold for $7 in India. Now She's Telling Her Story”. 

October 25, 2017. Global Citizen. Accessed 20 November 2019.

Tobia, P.J. “Change Your Role in Forced and Child Labor”. August 16, 2016. TEDxNashville. 

Accessed 21 November 2019.

“Uganda: Child Labour in Tea Plantations” 2006. International Labour Organization.  Accessed 

20 November 2019.