Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [201]
Like most systems of work in Malaya, the rubber plantations were designed for single migrant men. Now they were home to families, which in many cases had to be rebuilt from the trauma of war. In 1946 there were 5,591 widows in the rubber industry; 6,795 children left with only one parent, and 2,324 orphans.27 The ‘labour lines’ – terraces of one-room cottages – were often little more than ‘sleeping boxes’ bereft of such basic facilities as running water and privacy. They were nests of neighbourly disputes, and completely unsuited to family life. The fundamental economic reality was that a man’s wages – 70 cents a day – could not support a family. After the war, women and children comprised over 40 per cent of the estate workforce. But women and children were paid at a far lower rate than men for what were often equally hard ‘tasks’. A cost of living allowance brought a man’s wages to $1.10, but this was far below what was paid to Chinese employed through contractors, who could expect at least $2 a day, and maybe where there was demand, $3 or $3.50. The government and employers struggled to justify such discrimination, arguing that the Tamils received free housing and, being physically weaker, were less productive. But behind these arguments lay crude racial typologies: the Chinese were a ‘pushing, hard-working, independent people’; the Tamil, on the other hand, ‘looks for security and a settled life, and has little ambition because of his background, going back three thousand years, which has given him his caste and position in life’.28 Young Tamils were trapped in a cycle of poverty and low expectations. In 1947 the labour code was amended to raise the minimum age for child labour to eight years, for light agricultural and horticultural work. There were 25,000 Indian children at work on Malaya’s plantations: schools on estates were of woeful quality, and few children attended them beyond the age of ten. ‘It is because of their poverty’, an Indian labour leader explained, ‘that these workers have to send their children to work against all the laws of humanity.’29
Before the war, the larger European plantation companies, such as Boulle’s employer, Socfin, had worked to improve workers’ health and housing. But government intervention was too weak to enforce better standards on the smaller and poorer estates. Change was often dependent on the price of rubber, and was motivated less by humanitarianism than by the desire to increase workers’ efficiency.30 As with most colonial reform, improvement and social control went hand in hand: it did not enable labourers to move freely between employers or bargain collectively. By 1947, there were planters who, as prisoners of the Japanese, had worked alongside Indian labourers on the Burma–Thailand railway and knew their needs. Jacques le Doux of Johore, who spent over forty years in Malaya, recognized that in 1942 ‘our world came to an end’. He wrote a ‘Countryman’s journal’ for the Straits Times which traced his deepening empathy with the labouring world that surrounded him.31 But others had difficulty coming to terms with the post-war world. ‘Where are the stiffs of yesteryear?’, lamented a columnist in the trade rag, The Planter. ‘The new types seemed to have lost the old joie de vivre and to have been prematurely sobered by their harrowing experiences of the last six years.’32 Many were determined to revive their former authority, and live a life that, in the words of a Times correspondent, resembled ‘that of an eighteenth century country gentleman enlivened