SL apparel industry ‘sweats’ over workers

Sri Lanka’s apparel industry, a 400,000 strong workforce, is fighting hard to attract approximately 10,000 workers and will be having a serious deliberation on the matter. Some officials are talking of even hiring foreign recruits.

Once a budding industry, easily attracting labour, today finds it difficult to retain staff in the face of stiff competition from other sectors like the lucrative tourism and the retail businesses like supermarkets.

“We are actually trying to make a serious deliberation ( on labour issues) at the next committee meeting,” Joint Apparel Association Federation ( JAAF) Secretary General Tuly Cooray said in an interview with the Business Times on Monday.

He noted that previous campaigns to attract workers by marketing their industry in the provinces had not brought the desired results.

The problem is acute in populous regions like the Western province since there are other opportunities for the youth with openings in the tourism industry and supermarket chains, he explained.

Timex Group CEO Rohan Abeykoon told the Business Times that like in their organization which is moving towards technology and innovation, the way forward for the industry was to improve in these areas since labour centric industries would always have a shortage of labour.

He explained that the industry’s dependency on labour has to start “waning” since the workforce that was existing at the time the apparel industry started out about 30 years back has now moved about two generations and so their demands today are not the same.

“People are looking for more socially inclined jobs,” he said adding that hiring overseas workers would not hold well since it would mean the industry would have to incur a higher cost.

At Timex he pointed out they were trying to get “more efficient and lean with top line growth by making existing facilities more efficient through increased diversification of products and value addition.”