ECONOMYNEXT — All estate owners in Sri Lanka should implement the decision to increase the plantation workers’ wages to 1,700 rupees from June and those that fail to do so will be taken over by the government and handed over to others who will manage them properly, Labour Minister Manusha Nanayakkara said.
Small tea estate owners are already paying more than the prescribed minimum wage and there is a problem related to increasing these wages in the regional estate companies which have been transferred to the private sector from the government, a statement from the ministry quoted Nanayakkara as saying.
Small estate owners however are paying pluckers based on the volume of kilo plucked around 50 rupees a kilogram.
The privatized firms say they are offering more on a the basis as smallholders and workers who have not been prevented by the unions are earning between 40,000 to 75,000 rupees a month on the same basis.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe has told the cabinet of ministers that a bill must be drafted to take over the estate companies that do not implement the minimum wage and “give them to those who can implement them properly”, the statement said.
Separate discussions have been held with estate owners and labour unions, and because the parties could not reach an agreement, the ministry had convened the Wage Boards, said Nanayakkara.
“In the first instance, the estate owners did not attend, and they officially informed us that they would not participate in the second session. Therefore, as a last resort, we proposed a wage of 1,700 rupees, inclusive of a basic wage of 1,350 and a 350 rupee allowances, based on the legal provisions we have. We gazetted this on April 30 and May 1, giving the relevant parties 15 days to file objections,” he said.
“Since no substantial objections were received, the Department of Labour, the government, and I, as the Minister of Labour, finalised the notification last Thursday,” he added.
The Planters’ Association representing said they met President Ranil Wickremesinghe and govt officials and explained that they cannot pay as much as 1700, which works out to 74 percent increase with EPF.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe had requested owners on numerous occasions to raise the wage, said Nanayakkara.
“When this country fell during the time of COVID-19, the estate workers made a great sacrifice because they could not have a meal of rice, a roti, or drink plain tea,” he said.
“The President repeatedly urged the estate owners to provide a reasonable wage to the workers. However, since we did not receive a satisfactory response, we took this decision. All estate owners will now have to pay this minimum basic wage.”
Tea farm managers say that successive governments have dealt heavy blows to the sector, in the form of the glyphosate ban which lost the country the Japanese market, the fertilizer ban which hit the sector badly and finally the currency crisis, which led cost rises.
Despite all what has done by successive governments to hit the plantations, managers says they have paid salaries and EPF. Meanwhile the residual government managed estates are in arrears of provident fund contributions deducted from the workers own salaries.
The private firms which bought the estates in the mid 1990s had paid 8,000 billion rupees to get the leasehold and last year each estate paid around 80 to 100 million in leases, which was adjusted upwards by the GDP deflator, after the currency crisis. (Colombo/May27/2024)