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Trade unions in Indonesia want the abolishment of a new law that has eliminated unions’ role in setting the minimum wage and resulted in low pay increases for workers.
Previously, a tripartite body of local government, employers and labor unions determined the minimum wage in each region every year, based on standard living costs.
However, the new legislation has ended workers’ involvement in setting the minimum wage and is based on inflation rates and economic growth. It ignores the regional wage councils, placing all power with the regional governor.
Consequently wage increases for workers in 2017 have been extremely low. Wages in Indonesia are poor. Workers want a judicial review of the law in the Supreme Court.
The lack of participation of unions in setting the minimum wage has had an adverse effect on the minimum wage at the regional level, thus keeping wages far behind in relation to the rate of growth of the economy.
Trade unions say the government is putting business first rather than workers’ welfare. They want to be included in setting the minimum wage, in accordance with the employment law in the country and ILO conventions on freedom of association and the right to organize.
As skin cancer rates have soared and consumers have become more aware of the dangers of excessive exposure to the sun, the market for UV protective clothing has been growing markedly, according to a new report from the global business information company Textiles Intelligence – UV protective clothing: a practical approach to sun care
Expansion in the market has also been due to improvements in the functionality and appearance of UV protective clothing. In the early 2000s, the majority of items were heavy and dark and lacked style and comfort. But many items on the market today are fashionable as well as functional and such garments are available in a wide variety of colours, prints and styles.
In addition, the range of clothing items available has grown to include athletic wear, casual wear and outdoor sports wear. In the case of athletic wear and outdoor sports wear in particular, UV protective clothing is now being worn for a wide range of activities including climbing, cycling, fishing, football, golf, hiking, kayaking, sailing, skiing, surfing, swimming and tennis.
UV protective garments on offer at the premium end of the market boast of a number of performance features in addition to UV protection including antimicrobial action, comfort stretch and moisture management. Some of these products are also highly versatile as they can be worn as casual wear, sportswear and even fashion wear.
Reflecting these developments, UV protective garments and accessories are sold by well established clothing brands as well as by sports retailers. Also, a growing number of companies in the outdoor wear industry have incorporated UV protective technologies into their collections of technical clothing.
In Australia -- known by many as the skin cancer capital of the world and a leader in the development of UV protective technologies for textiles, UV protective fabrics are employed in a range of technical applications, including high visibility vests and police uniforms, as well as school uniforms.
Looking ahead, there is an opportunity for suppliers of UV protective clothing to increase their sales by reaching a wider group of consumers as people live longer and spend more time outdoors.
With the segment proving to be resilient amid the country's challenging retail environment due to shifting consumer behaviour and preferences for more differentiated shopping concepts, China's sportswear industry should see continued expansion over the next few years, says the Fitch Ratings.
Following the issues of store overexpansion and excess inventory having been resolved since 2012Both international and domestic brands have benefited from the expansion of China's sportswear industry which Fitch accredits to increased investment and higher sports participation.
The State Council aims to develop China's sports industry to CNY5 trillion by 2025 and increase the area available for practising sports. Greater interest in fitness and sports has also become more apparent with more people taking an interest in running, for instance that a total of 328 marathons were registered through the Chinese Athletic Association in 2016.
This attracted approximately 2.8 million participants, and representing an increase of 85 per cent compared with the previous year. Likewise, according to a news report the number of participants at private gyms across China's 70 major cities has increased by 4 to 5 million each year since 2011.
The China market is led by international brands adidas and Nike. While adidas reported over 20% constant currency growth for China in 2016, Nike also saw double digit growth in Greater China.
However, Fitch believes local brands can also benefit, since they offer consumers a competitive value-for-money proposition. For instance, local brand 361 Degrees International Limited (BB/Stable) saw over 7 per cent y-o-y same-store sales growth in 2016 and its trade-fair orders for 3Q17 achieved a high single-digit increase.
Linking their efforts to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as many as seventy one companies have got themselves up to the mark and put their names forward for benchmarking against their peers and competitors in the Textile Exchange Preferred Fibre & Materials (PFM) Benchmark programme.
61 per cent of companies have set targets for switching to a more sustainable source of cotton, three quarters having a specific target for organic.
Said Liesl Truscott, Materials Strategy Director for Textile Exchange, millions of people including cotton farmers, foresters and other textile feedstock providers form the base of the textile supply network and are impacted by the decisions brands and retailers make every day. Influencing improvement in fibre and material production is one of the greatest opportunities textile brands and retailers can contribute to securing a sustainable future.
Preferred is another way of saying more sustainable. Textile Exchange defines a preferred fibre or material (PFM) as one that is ecologically and socially progressive and has been selected because it has more sustainable properties in comparison to conventional options.
The mix of fibres in your product range can be just as important as the sustainability profile of each fiber,” Truscott added.
Textile Exchange recommends a portfolio approach building a suite of preferred fibre and materials from a choice of preferred options by way of the consideration of impacts and product range priorities. The goal is that PFMs are produced to a globally accepted standard, with strict criteria that qualifies the product as preferred, and can be traced through the supply chain.
One of the partnership is with the Appachi ECO-LOGIC Cotton Project in India which brings together a value chain from the farmers to the customers. The key is the partnership and working together – and we see this as pivotal for the entire industry. Seventy one companies, up from 57 last year, ranging from Adidas to Woolworths, completed a bespoke online survey and have received confidential company feedback reports revealing their individual results.An Industry report containing the combined results of all participating companies will be released this week.
The abnormal rise in prices of yarn that shot up by 35 per cent in the last three months is attributed to a direct fallout of the Central government tinkering with its cotton and yarn export policy. And that is the reason why the Karur home textile manufacturers and exporters are struggling to meet orders.
Karur home textile industry fetches foreign exchange to the tune of Rs. 4,000 crore a year. Hundreds of home textile manufacturers and exporters have been affected by the steep rise in prices of yarn have upset their calculations and future plans.
Home textiles products are made from lower count yarn for which the consumption of cotton is high compared to higher count yarn. With spinning mills running short of cotton, they are inclined to produce higher count yarn which leads to huge shortfall of lower count yarn for the Karur manufacturers.
Even if it is made available, the price of lower count yarn is very prohibitive, according to president of Karur Exporters' Association, ‘Atlas’ M. Nachimuthu.
Most of the Karur home textile exporters enter into annual price contracts with their clients abroad and the sudden and steep increase in prices of yarn directly impact them. They are also struggling to meet the delivery time schedule due to shortage of required count yarn and bleeding financially to honour commitments, Mr. Nachimuthu added.
The price quotes of Karur home textile exporters are on a higher side compared to those from China, Pakistan and Bangladesh among other countries who are our major competitors. As a matter of fact, there was every possibility of customers migrating to exporters from competing countries resulting in India losing its global market share in home textile exporters.
On this account, the Central government must seriously revisit the cotton and yarn export policy that was hurting the Karur home textile exporters on a massive scale. The huge volumes of cotton exports done ignoring the demand of domestic consumers such as spinning mills who cater to the requirements of specific categories such as home textile exporters must be immediately done away with. And the needs of domestic spinning mills should be looked into as top priorities.
Agreeing to meet to begin working toward a set of practices that will serve the industry at large, international leaders in the chemical industry for textiles have adopted a tagline that says that the key to a brighter blue is collaboration.
The effort to unite competing companies is part of the mission of the House of Denim, a not-for-profit industry organisation based in Amsterdam and Kingpins Transformers to incite real change that will improve the sustainability of the denim supply chain.
Amsterdam is home to some of the world’s leading jeans brands, but we are fully aware that to clean up this industry, we need to collaborate across borders and involve players from the various stages of denim: this is a complex global industry, said James Veenhoff, founder of House of Denim in a statement.
Although there’s a lot of hard work ahead, it’s exciting to see industry visionaries from as far apart as India, China, Europe and the Americas so unanimous in their support for this direction. We need our leaders to lead – and it appears that this is what is happening, starting from the world of chemistry, he added.
The conversation began during the October 2016 Kingpins Transformers event where chemical experts and company representatives discussed the challenges of providing sustainable solutions. However, they agreed that brands’ and retailers’ well-intended but inconsistent initiatives were creating a proliferation of unnecessary approaches to safer chemistry, and subsequently increasing the complexity of the solution.
Transformers initiator Andrew Olah observed that public opinion and concerns over the environment and safety have done a solid job at ‘shocking’ big brands into action. But to be honest, the chemical side of things is so complex that no company or brand is able to influence things on their own. That’s why this collaboration is so essential for real change to happen.
Earlier events of Transformers covered topics in water, chemistry and waste and have included presentations by Lenzing. The next conference will take place the day after Kingpins Amsterdam on April 21, and will focus on the cost of sustainability.
The first half of the event will invite experts throughout the supply chain to briefly describe what can be done in their segment of the supply chain to make sustainability more accessible, followed by a lively discussion for all to take part. Andreas Dorner, Commercial Director of Europe and Americas from Lenzing, will be presenting on the value of sustainability.
Target has signed on to sponsor the event for the first time, a move that Olah says corresponds with the retailer’s mission to make the apparel industry cleaner.
ContiTech has opened a new facility in China for coated fabrics. ContiTech is a leading supplier of technical elastomer products and a specialist in plastics technology. This is its first international production site for elastomer coatings outside Germany.
The plant produces high-performance coated materials for a variety of applications. The product range includes robust concertina wall materials, which connects railway carriages together, or fabrics for protective equipment, dry diving suits or life rafts.
This is an ultramodern and climate-friendly facility equipped with leading production technology that can only be operated by a few companies worldwide.
The plant aims to set benchmarks for an ecological and energy-friendly manufacturing. Based on cutting-edge facilities for waste air treatment, the site stays below Chinese emission limits more than ten times. Its thermal insulation systems are also said to significantly help save energy.
ContiTech supplies customers in China and further Asia and is already selling coated fabrics in China, such as diaphragms for automotive fuel management or robust and weatherproof materials for folding bellows used in railway vehicles.
With the new plant, customers will benefit from local production possibilities, expertise and local service capability. The company already supplies calendered material and other semi-finished goods for air springs and transmission belts.
Vietnam is looking for cooperation with Thailand in the areas of textiles, design and administration.
Vietnam has the skills and ability to become an apparel production hub for international buyers, but it lacks upstream and midstream channels. Thailand’s textile and garment industry, on the other hand, has an entire supply chain cycle from upstream to downstream, from yarn manufacturing to apparel manufacturing. It also includes fashion design.
Therefore, establishing a fully vertical integrated supply chain between Thailand and Vietnam will help the countries sustain their competitiveness.
Trade turnover between the two countries totaled ten billion dollars last year, a year-on-year increase of 12.5 per cent.
Last year, Vietnam earned 76 million dollars from yarn exports to Thailand and spent 194 million dollars on importing fabric from the country.
The co-operation of the two sides would also help the industry better exploit the Asean market of 600 million people, when the Asean Economic Community becomes effective by the end of the year.
With increasing costs in China, as well as competitiveness with other industries, many garment and textile producers have shifted their production base to Asean countries, including Vietnam.
Vietnam has signed, and is negotiating, a number of free trade agreements. Thai enterprises want to enhance co-operation with Vietnamese firms to produce fabric and materials in Vietnam to take advantages of benefits brought from trade agreements.
Spain’s textile sector is coming out of the recession.
The number of Spanish suppliers of fabrics, fibers and accessories such as buttons had plunged by about a third since 2008. Spanish textile firms were slow to innovate and adapt to the increasingly fast-changing demands of the fashion industry.
Many company bosses in the sector still have a mentality of industrialists, not of entrepreneurs. But last year, the number of textile firms stopped falling for the first time since 2008, stabilising at around 3,500 companies. The sector is benefitting from Spain's economic rebound - growth stood at 3.2 per cent in 2016, double the eurozone average -- and the disappearance of less competitive firms. The firms that survived were those that were export-oriented, able to diversify their order book and respond more quickly to customers' demands.
Spain's textile exports, which account for 60 per cent of sector-wide sales, rose by seven per cent last year. The focus on international sales adopted by major fashion retailers has also pushed smaller firms to modernise and shift their focus to activities with higher added value.
Companies have also diversified away from fabrics destined only for fashion and now also make technical fabrics for the automobile, agriculture or sports sectors.
Spinning mills in south India can expect stable cotton prices and supplies.
The cotton production for the 2016-17 season will probably be more than adequate to meet the demand from spinning mills. This should check a further rise in the price of cotton. Moreover international prices are expected to be benign as well thanks to a bumper crop in Australia, an 18 per cent increase in production in the US and restricted imports by China.
If cotton prices remain stable from here on, it will help contain raw material costs for a few quarters ahead. Meanwhile, higher domestic demand for textiles and garments and higher exports will improve demand for yarn.
Leading mills such as Vardhman Textiles, KPR Mills and Ambika Cotton Mills have reported double-digit year-on-year growth in sales over the past three quarters, although exports have been subdued.
And despite the high cotton prices and the challenges related to demonetization, these companies managed stable operating margins over the past three quarters in the range of 18.5 per cent to 20 per cent. Thanks to the robust performance, stocks of these firms have rallied substantially in the past year and are now trading close to the 52-week high prices.
