Employer-employee debate over productivity improvement in the Sri Lankan tea plantation sector: who is right - employers or employees?

Abstract

The relative importance of Sri Lanka’s tea plantation industry as a major tea producer and a foreign currency earner has reduced over time. Considering this depressing trend, the plantation companies accuse tea workers and their unions giving a lower level of labour productivity compared to its competitors. But worker unions do not accept this assertion highlighting that companies have neglected the development and maintenance of tea plantations for not enabling tea workers to increase productivity. Hence, continuous debate has emerged in respect of increasing labour productivity between employers and employees in the tea plantation industry.  Therefore, this study aims at examining who is right in this debate following a case study method of research based on a selected up-country tea estate as the study’s setting while tea estate managers, tea plucking workers, union officers therein and other experts as actors using snowballing sampling method for obtaining information. Accordingly, the study found that company managers were trying to maximize the short-run production function by increasing only variable factor, labour productivity undermining what should be done in the long-run while trade unions and workers talk of the need to maximize multifactor productivity function or long-run production function but with emphasizing more on increasing other factors’ productivity rather than that of labour. Accordingly, the study concludes that both parties are only partially correct in their arguments for productivity enhancement. Besides, and more prominently, the study finds that both sides are not yet aware of the importance of the concept of total factor productivity as found by international researchers for ensuring continuous productivity growth in industries, especially in a background of depleting the availability of overall volume of inputs that now the Sri Lankan tea industry is also confronting.

KEYWORDS: employees, employers, productivity, production functions, tea plantations