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Sunday, 18 December 2005    
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Fifteen garment factories close, 3,000 lose jobs

by Gamini Warushamana

Sunitha Kumudini was a sewing machine operator of A. J. Milton company, a medium scale garment factory.

When she went to work on June 27 morning, a notice on the factory gate said that the company has been closed until further notice.

The company closed without paying the employees salaries and wages. Kumudini, a 40-years-old skilled worker in the garment sector says that today she can't find a similar job on account of her age.

A mother of two children she was the only income earner of the family and after she lost her job the family is facing severe hardship.

Badrika Chandani's story is also similar. She was working at Cadilac Garments in the Katunayake, Free Trade Zone.The company closed down in May 2004 as it did not get enough quotas.

Employees organised and protested but the management assaulted them using thugs. Chandani, 37 also faces the same problem in finding a job. She is unmarried but her whole family depends on her income.

This is the sad story of garment employees, mainly females who lost their jobs after the phase out of the Multi Fibre Agreement (MFA) by the end of last year.

The impact of the phase out of MFA on workers in the country has been analysed by the recent study carried out by Oxfam, MFA forum and the Apparel Industry Labour Rights Movement (ALARM).

According to the interim report presented last week, from January to September, fifteen garment factories in Sri Lanka have closed down and as a result over 3,000 employees have lost their jobs. The study is also following up the closure details of another twenty-two factories.

Of these fifteen companies only four companies had paid any form of compensation to the workers. Most of them closed down abruptly without adequate notice to the workers and almost all of them had huge EPF defaults. Some companies had not even paid the earned wages of the workers, the report said.

Fourteen of the fifteen factories are in rural areas and the workers would be hard pressed to find any alternative employment.

The sad part is that no one is concerned about this and the abdication of responsibility by the stakeholders is alarming. In addition to such outright closures there have also been significant shedding in many small and medium factories. The exact number of the job displacement is not yet known, the report said.

The age problem of female garment employees was highlighted for the first time in this survey. Employers prefer young employees. The sector is experiencing a significant skilled labour shortage and sources said that there are around 30,000 vacancies in the sector.

Industrialists warn that this would endanger the industry. The MFA phase out adversely affected workers in textile and clothing industries worldwide. Job losses in countries such as Lesotho, Philippines, Nigeria, Kenya and Mexico are very high. But all the job losses predicted in 2005 did not materialise.

However, labour organisations worldwide have confirmed that the competitive environment further weakened the conditions of women workers in factory floors.

The threat of the MFA has been used by manufacturers to exploit workers by weakening their protection, providing poor working conditions, increasing overtime work, increasing targets, cut back benefits and suppressing social security payments.

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