A black economic empowerment (BEE) consortium is to be set up in a bid to save the embattled Rex Trueform clothing company, Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool announced on Tuesday.
This follows talks between textile-factory owners and trade-union leaders on ways to avert the closure of a Rex Trueform plant outside Cape Town.
The future of the plant is threatened by a flood of cheap Chinese clothing imports.
Rasool said the provincial government will also assist in a bid to ensure the sustainability of the textile industry.
”They have agreed instead to use the opportunity to explore alternative options, such as the building of a BEE company that can manage it well, turn it around, make it profitable and retain as many of the workers and expertise as possible at Rex Trueform,” he said.
”The company has agreed that if it does hand over to a BEE [company], it will do so on preferential terms.”
Rasool said he has agreed, together with unions and the company, to see how the provincial government can strengthen any such consortium, so that it has the requisite expertise ”and hopefully also the finances”.
A recent editorial in the Mail & Guardian newspaper said the 67-year-old factory in Cape Town is a ”working-class institution, the site of the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union’s birth, and now the latest victim of the crisis in the rag trade”. — Sapa