However, if there were American tea farmers, they would not be paying pickers $5.85/h, nor concerning themselves with OH&S. That’s what Mexicans are for. Nonetheless, I think the economics still holds.

… with no OSHA laws, either. Visit a tea factory, and you can’t breathe the air. Lung diseases run high. Furthermore, the pickers I interviewed in Sri Lanka lost large portions of their pay if they didn’t meet the daily quota. Men (working inside the factory) and women (working in the field) both faced these problems.

Meanwhile, the social and economic realities endured by Adavasi tea pickers in Assam, India, (the birthplace of tea, as far as the West is concerned) recently led to bloody riots and killings in the streets. Poverty is an understatement.

“According to the company guide who showed me around, the plantation is 1,200 acres in size, and employs 900 women as tea pickers. I asked my the Mackwoods representative why only women are used as tea pickers. “Because they have more sensitive fingers,” she told me, “which are necessary for picking the buds.” A more plausible explanation came from my guide, Sarath. Women can be paid less than men.

Let’s do some arithmetic here. Each picker picks up to 40 kg of tea a day. According to a 2005 BBC report, workers’ wages depend on how many leaves they can collect, but average wages are about US$60 per month. My guide gave me a somewhat higher figure of $3.50 per day. Using a figure midway between these two would mean that Mackwoods pays something like $2,500 per day in picker’s wages, or about 7c per kilo of tea plucked (this is the weight of the newly plucked leaves; the weight is reduced signficantly during processing.)

If tea were grown in the United States, with pickers earning the minimum wage of $5. 85 an hour, a Mackwood-sized contingent of 900 workers would earn around $42,000 per day, or about $1.17 per kilo of tea picked. At this price, the cost of processed tea to the consumer would be prohibitively high, and tea would price itself out of the market. And because of the peculiar needs of tea cultivation, the possibilities of using mechanization to lower costs are not very great.

In other words, it’s just as well for the world’s tea drinkers that their favorite beverage is produced in poor, tropical countries like Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam, and Tanzania.”