After the tea leaves are delivered at the factory, they are withered for maximally one day, and rolled after that. Consequently, the tea is dried and, if it is black tea, fermented. Finally, only 25% of the original weight remains. At the Bangladesh Tea Research Institute, they not only have a small scale tea production, but also carry out research on hybrids, new varieties, yields, pest control and seed production.
In 1984, an article was published about the deplorable salaries of tea pickers. In those days, that was Taka 8.50 or 35 dollar cents per day. Nowadays, you don't read about them often any more. And that is not because their incomes have increased. They earn 1.5 Taka per kg tea. An average picker picks 20 kg a day, a very speedy one picks 28 kg, so per day they get between 30 and 42 Taka, in most of the cases less than half a dollar per day. One kg fresh tea will produce 250 gram of dried tea. But the tea pickers don't earn enough to buy tea for themselves.
Some tea estate owners will tell you, that even though the salary is only 10 dollar per month to the tea pickers, they also give them many other things: a house on the estate, a school for the children, yes, even a medical facility. They find they offer pure charity to their employees. Conveniently they forget, that it must be very profitable to make people so dependent. They will have to work for you until they drop: after all their house is here, their school, even their doctor. And they have no money to go anywhere else. The Middle Ages re-emerge.

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