Struggling to survive and manage their business, SME apparel exporters of Delhi-NCR are in a Catch-22 situation. Few months ago, most of these factories fired majority of their workers, owing to less orders. However, now as the factories have finally received some orders from overseas and from the domestic market, they are facing a shortage of manpower for shop floor which includes stitching operator, supervisors, and operators in quality, packaging etc.
Though earlier a good number of workers were available, now there is ‘shortage’ due to many reasons, the biggest being that a large number of migratory workers went to their villages and didn’t come back, as there was no work. Some of the workers who were fired have got jobs in other factories or even in other trade and they are not willing to come back to their previous factories. On the other hand, hard working conditions in garment factories are also responsible for the shortage of workers. “Earlier our factory was giving advance to workers, full attendance bonus was also being given but now there is no such scheme. Even their payment gets deduct if they came late…it is really demotivating for workers and they don’t want to work with us again,” admitted a Noida-based factory official on the request of anonymity.
According to sources, rather than keeping workers long term, many factories are rotating workers within 3 to 6 months. In Delhi-NCR, workers are used to working overtime (OT) to make more money but now due to lesser orders, factories can’t offer OT so many workers are not interested to work for regular hours only. Further, there is an increasing trend of piece rate employment by workers, while factories generally prefer to hire workers on salary basis.
These conditions are also pressurizing labour suppliers, as garment factories are giving debit note against them for small issues. To overcome this problem, most of the labour contractors are no longer offering credit period, which was a common practice earlier, but instead asking for cash payments or immediate transfer of payment for security.
Commenting on the above situation, Ajay Mishra, GM-HR, CTA Apparels, Noida told Apparel Resources, “These months normally also have some shortage of workers due to Eid, agricultural reasons and marriage season. Migratory workers go back to their states. We as a company are not facing such a shortage of workers as we are getting some workers who were fired from SMEs or non-compliant factories. Such workers are happy to work with us or any other organized factory that despite having market pressures, offers more facilities than SME factories.”