Promoting the unionisation of workers in Malawi’s informal tea sector

The unionisation of workers in the informal tea-growing sector in Malawi is a good practice that has contributed to the fight against child labour in the tea supply chain. Informal smallholder tea growers represented by the National Smallholder Tea Growers Association (NSTGA), sell their tea to enterprises in the formal tea sector, which are represented by the Tea Association of Malawi (TAML). In some cases, the smallholder farmers also work as temporary and seasonal employees in the formal sector. However, only the formal sector was unionised through the establishment of the Plantation Agriculture Workers Union (PAWU) in 1947. Non-unionised workers in the informal tea sector faced a variety of problems, such as abuse of their labour rights, lack of representation, and inability to bargain with tea estates’ management.

To address this problem, there was a push in 2022 to promote the unionisation of the informal tea sector and safeguard the welfare of informal workers, as well as of temporary and seasonal workers. According to Malawi’s Labour Relations Act, a group of seven individuals with an interest can form a worker’s union after making an application to the Ministry of Labour for registration. However, in this case, the creation and registration of another union was not necessary, as PAWU was already a functional union, which then only needed to extend its membership to include workers in the informal sector.