Role of family and trade unions in affecting women workers fair representation inside Trade Unions of Assam Tea Plantations

This study focuses on women workers in tea plantations of Assam to understand their polit-ical representation inside trade unions. Despite constituting the majority of workforce, their socio-economic issues remain unheard. Trade unions accountability towards securing work-ers interests and security is found to be bleak due to which women attain the lowest position inside the plantation hierarchy. In this study, roles of both trade unions and families is fo-cused on either favouring or restricting a fair representation of women workers. Both public and private spaces are considered to study how different social, economic, political, and his-torical elements affect women workers lives. This study uses a theoretical framework of patriarchy and gender, sexual division of labour, feminization of labour and intersectionality to uncover and analyse how women workers face marginalization that directly and indirectly shapes their position, thereby limit-ing their political representation. This paper argues that the economic space continues to effect women workers’ political representation due to socio-economic, political, and histori-cal factors. Social space of families though is patriarchal in nature; the level of patriarchal authority is not similar inside the tea garden families of Assam.