Abstract:
Immigrant labourers in Ceylon \orerewholly Indian and were
predominQntly plantation workers. The rapid expansion of plantation
agriculture in our period, which was spearheaded by British capital and
enterprise, took place under a supply of immigrant labour, which was
on the whole favourable to the industry. The planters were tapping a
free labOur market in South India, for India did not impose restrictions
on migration to Ceylon so long as the immigrants wer-e on monthly
contracts with the facility to return to their villages periodically.
The planters preferred free as against indenture labour, for it opened
up a chronic surplus of labour in a poverty-stricken condition to the
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free market forces of supply and demand. They, on the whole, concentrated
on improving the methods of recruitment and transportation of labour so
as to increase the inflow. The planters' problem was not so much the inadequacy
of the labour supply as the problem of labour instability--of
keeping the labourers on the estate for long periods. The coffee
planter's technique was to withhold part of the wages until the end of
the crop season. But the tea planter, with a year round demand for
labour, required a longer holdo His technique was to place the labourer
under a dead-weight of indebtedness to the estate. This was done by
giving out indiscriminate cash advances, with a low wage scale where
the wages were inadequate to work off the debt. The planters preferred
to compete for labour on advances than on the wage scale. The cash
advances, therefore, came to play the role which the wages play in a
present-day Labouz market. With a low and a stagnant "'age scale, the
labourers turned to the advances to meet the gap between inadequate
wages and the rising cost of living, but in the process got steeped in indebtedness. Being familar with indebtedness in South India, the
immigrant acquiesced. The system brought about little economic progress
for the labourer. The migratory nature of the labour population and
the kangand es ' hold over the labour gangs contributed to the overall
poverty. Government policy was one of non-interference into planter-labour
industrial relations. However, in those other spheres in which the
Colonial Government opted to interfere, viz., in providing transport
facilities for the immigrants and also labour welfare schemes, labour
conditions saw some improvement. But these measures did not bring about
a striking progress in labour life partly because these schemea were
not sufficiently far reaching in a period of rapid expansion of the
immigraht labour population and more important, because of the overall
i,mpoverished and debt-ridden state of the labour community.