Floréal Knitwear is about to axe 900 jobs from its 4,000-strong workforce as part of a major overhaul plan. The leading textile group has taken steps to deal with the inevitable crisis that is hanging over them with the end of textile preferential quotas in 2005. The management argues that they will soon have to face competition from big producers like China or India and have to make tough decisions to survive in this context. Trade unions have expressed their discontent on the issue.

“We are setting up three units that will be able to take charge of the whole production process – from start to finish. Right now, we have factories which make pullovers but the latter have then to be sent to another factory for the finishing. Such a model is just not viable,” Harold Mayer, executive manager of the textile operations of Ciel Textile group, explains.

<B>Staff transfer</B>

Activities will be reorganised around fully autonomous units: the factory units in Mangalkhan and Reunion. The latter will not only deal with dyeing and finishing but also with knitting and pullover manufacture. The closing down of the other units will involve redundancies, as well as staff transfer to the remaining production sites.

This redesigning will allow important cost cutting and better efficiency according to of Floréal Knitwear management. They have even declared that this very necessary decision should help to save 3,000 jobs.

However, this view is not shared by the trade unions. “There is no coherence in this policy. We don’t understand this centralisation logic,” they say. While Floréal Knitwear gives the assurance that the decision will include an “elaborate support plan to allow employees to have other possibilities,” trade unions find it vague.

They are however relieved that there are “only” 900 redundancies while they were expecting 2,000, but they are still dissatisfied. Yusuf Souklall, president of the Free Democratic Union Federation, thinks that “each closure or redundancy is already too much.”

<B>World Trade Organisation meeting</B>

The Doha round of negotiations will finally be revived. The minister of Foreign affairs, Jayen Cuttaree, who was in Geneva last week, must be satisfied and relieved by this decision since he was sceptical about the reaching of a consensus on the issue. Thanks to the framework agreement, Mauritius will have more freedom concerning its tariffs policy on industrial products such as textiles.