In March, 2017 we brought you a story about a Life of Labour: Changing outcomes for Families in Bangladesh. The workers in the Tea Gardens in Moulvibazar are one of the most deprived groups in Bangladesh, working in slave-like conditions and earning approximately 90 AUD cents a day.
The locals in Moulvibazar are mainly indentured labourers who struggle to feed their children, let alone send them to school. Currently, the payment for workers in the tea gardens is basic living accommodation and approximately TK 2 per kilo or AUD 0.017 cents per kilo. These families face daily challenges as recently reported in The Daily Star (a Bangladeshi newspaper published in Dhaka) where workers have gone on strike after demanding a pay rise from TK 2 per kilo to TK 5 per kilo (AUD 0.08 cents) and their accommodation is repaired after collapsing in recent storms. Moreover, they are asking for jobs for their children because the tea gardens only allows 1 person from a family to work which ensures they can’t save enough to up skill and potentially move out.
Gain, writing in The Daily Star said that “as citizens of Bangladesh, the tea workers are free to live anywhere in the country they choose. But the reality is that many of them have never stepped out of the tea gardens. Social and economic exclusion, dispossession and the treatment they get from their management and Bengali neighbors have rendered them captive laborers.Unfortunately they remain socially excluded, low-paid, overwhelmingly illiterate, deprived and disconnected.” Ultimately, these workers will return to the tea gardens as they are so impoverished they have no money, food or accommodation to go or do anything else.
AMS works with Lenity Australia and St. Marcellin High School in Moulvibazar to try and help bring education and ultimately change to the region. The school provides children of the tea gardens a chance to empower themselves through school. Lenity Australia has provided female scholarships so that the girls of the tea gardens can attend school. These scholarships have meant that the school provides a balanced male and female cohort. To learn more about the school or to help, visit: St Marcellin School | BA0002