Industrial leather gloves exporters in Bengal are facing a hard time as fresh orders have dried up.
Exports declined by over 30 per cent every month since the beginning of the year.
Bengal was the main base for exported industrial leather gloves with a 95 per cent share.
Around 400 units here employed nearly 3 lakh people whose livelihood was now at stake. "Leather gloves exports dropped by 34 per cent in February at Rs 65.41 crore from Rs 99 crore in January", said Paresh Rajda, the regional chairman of the Council for Leather Exports (CLE), and also the promoter of Rajda Industries and Exports.
There was a marginal dip of 0.3 per cent when the February data was compared on a year-on-year basis. However, CLE claimed that average exports of industrial leather gloves had increased from Rs60 crore per month in the beginning of 2008 to around Rs 90 crore per month after June 2008. Rajda claimed that the industry had actually grown by 20 per cent up to December 2008. Orders started drying out since October 2008 and shipments of old orders happened till December. The international buyers in Europe and the US then started demanding 20 to 30 per cent discount on products as raw material prices had come down in the last six months.
Industry insiders claimed that some buyers also demanded discounts on already delivered shipments. "Manufacturers have bought raw material at the rate of Rs28 per square foot, and now the prices have come down to Rs20 per square foot.", complained a Kolkata-based exporter. Average prices of finished industrial leather gloves have come down in the international market to $1 to $1.2 from $1.6-$1.8 earlier.
"Exporters are trying their best to retain their workforce as it takes time to train the people but are cutting down hours", Rajda said. Most export factories were now working for four days a week as opposed to earlier six-day weeks. At the entry level, workers were paid between Rs 3000 to Rs4000 a month on an average and freshers constituted nearly 65 per cent of the workforce in the sector. The wages were calculated on a daily basis, so missing out on days meant loss of pay to these families. Local manufacturers here said they hoped that things would improve from the third quarter of the calender year. If it did not, companies would have to resort to job cuts. Nationally, around 3.5 lakh people lost jobs in the sector since September 2008 and another 500,000 jobs were reportedly under the axe.