The Hindu Business Line : Women workers leave cashew industry broken

Kollam, Feb. 4 Ms Kalyani, a cashew factory worker in her early fifties, recently quit her job. The reason: “My son is an IT professional and he does not want me to work any more in the factory.”

At least 10 per cent of the workforce in the cashew industry, especially women, is under pressure from their professionally qualified children to leave their jobs.

These professionals find their mothers or sisters working in cashew factories incompatible to their current social status.

Similarly, young girls also prefer to work as sales-girls in shops rather than taking up jobs in cashew factories, where they have to handle raw cashew nuts in a factory environment. This is despite wages in the factories being higher.

Changed mindset

Socio-economic conditions of late seem to have changed the mindset of the people. Traditional industries such as cashew and coir in Kerala are experiencing shortage of labour as a result of this.

The worst hit is the cashew sector in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which employs over three lakh workers. Over 90 per cent of the workers are women. The emerging situation has forced the sector to seriously consider mechanisation.

The changing socio-economic factors, consequent to economic growth which is throwing up more opportunities, have made employment in cashew factories unattractive, Mr G. Krishnan Nair, CEO of KGN Group, told Business Line. Also, a majority of the workers are in their 40s and 50s and their productivity is on the wane. Therefore, the cashew industry sees labour as unsustainable and technology more reliable.

No replacements

According to Mr Anu S. Pillai, another processor-exporter, 20 per cent of the workforce would retire in three years without proportionate replacement both in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Children of at least 10 per cent of the workers have acquired professional education and taken up lucrative jobs. In Tamil Nadu, women workers do not turn up after their marriage.

As a result, the processors have to compete to get workers and in that pursuit, workers are given advances up to Rs 10,000 to ensure they join their units, Mr Pillai said.

The current situation would lead to mechanisation of the units or processing activities could be shifted to Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, where the wages are almost half of that in Kerala, he said. But, there are other problems.

Mechanisation is likely to lead to revenue loss as the breakage of kernels will be higher. In fact, “manual processing helps us to compete both in terms of quality and price”. However, he said, partial mechanisation appears to be on cards in the near future.

Mr R.S. Dinesh Chandra, a processor-exporter who had visited Vietnam recently on a study tour, said mechanisation would help the industry to increase processing volume and in turn, it would improve productivity. The rate of broken kernels could be brought down gradually, he said. Besides, the workers could be re-deployed elsewhere within the unit and thus, there would not be any reduction in labour.

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