Slowdown hit textile units stop recruitment

Indian textile units exporting to the US and Europe

are once again facing the low or no order situation in the wake of another global economic slowdown. To add to their woes, exports to other destinations like Russia and Japan have also shown slump in new orders. If the current situation persists, forget about hiring new recruits, some textile units fear a total shut down of their businesses.

To keep the business running, firms decided to focus domestic markets, as suggested by experts during the last recessionary phase but this step too would not help much with Bangladesh dumping cheaper apparel items in India under the duty free access granted to them recently. In fact, some exporters have already begun visiting Bangladesh to take advantage of the low labour and production cost to be competitive against Bangladesh imports.

According to A Sakthivel, President Tirupur Exporters Association (TEA), there has been a slowdown in demand in the Europe and the US, which has resulted in textile units having low task at hand these days. The units have already started reducing working hours from six days to four to five days a week and there is no new recruitment happening. Tirupur, major apparel manufacturing cluster has around 3,000 garment manufacturing units and its total yearly exports account to Rs 12,000 crores. The total workforce at Tirupur is estimated to be nearly 4 lakh. Among all these issues, the only respite for textile exporters in the present scenario has been the weak rupee against dollar.