The Tea Industry: A New Sustainability Approach

Abstract

What do unions do? In a landmark title by this name (1984), Harvard University economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff demonstrated that labour unions have two faces. One is confrontational and the other is cooperative. The confrontation face emerges when unions negotiate upwards the wages of its members; the cooperation face emerges when the union feeds back worker level information to management and uses its influence on workers to foster improvements in performance and productivity. Freeman and Medoff call this second cooperative element “voice”. The union can give “voice” to insights accruing at the worker level and effectively “voice” to workers the needs of management. In the context of a renegotiation of the tea plantation workers’ collective agreement which began in April 2015, this Insight argues that this is an opportune time for both the unions and management need to see beyond the confrontational face of trade unionism and invoke their cooperative face. The costs of failing to do so are serious, not only for workers but also for the industry and for Sri Lanka’s economy.