Impact of coach ethical leadership on athlete satisfaction and organizational commitment.

Millions of women around the world work in tea gardens and similar labour-intensive industries under conditions of chronic poverty, physical exhaustion and social marginalisation. Yet, their mental health has received almost no systematic research attention. This study brings that invisibility into focus. By listening directly to working mothers in the tea gardens of Bangladesh, through surveys and interviews, this research reveals that psychological distress is not an individual failing but a predictable consequence of structurally unjust working and living conditions. Low wages that cannot sustain a family, no toilets in the fields, biometric attendance systems that punish illness and the absence of childcare during an 8-h shift are not peripheral issues, they are the architecture of distress. What makes these findings significant is their reach beyond the mothers. Children growing up in households where mothers report depression and anxiety are more likely to show behavioural and emotional difficulties, a pattern this study documents and gives voice to through the words of mothers, supervisors and community leaders. This is a pattern consistent with intergenerational disadvantage, and the structural conditions that produce it are modifiable. The implications extend well beyond Bangladesh. Tea garden and plantation communities exist across South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the structural conditions documented here, low wages, physical hazard, gender-based exploitation, absent childcare and stigmatised mental illness, are common across them. This study offers a model for how to research marginalised occupational communities using methods that honour both numbers and lived experience.