An autopsy of the tea workers’ bizarre wage structure

The Minimum Wage Board (MWB), formed in October 2019, declared a draft wage structure for tea garden workers through a gazette notice published on June 13, 2021. There are daily rated and monthly rated workers in the tea gardens. The much-talked-about issue is what a daily rated tea worker gets in cash. This time, the wage board, headed by a senior district judge who actually joined as its chairman in April 2021, fixed the daily cash pay of a worker at Tk 120 for A category gardens, Tk 118 for B category gardens, and Tk 117 for C category gardens. (The category of a tea garden is determined by the volume of tea it produces—wages for the registered and casual workers are the same.)