The South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) on Friday came out in support of the government’s efforts to limit Chinese clothing and textile imports.
The SACC has commended government’s plans to introduce new quotas while the SACP said the deal would save jobs.
”The SACC and the larger international ecumenical movement have been longstanding advocates of fair trade, as opposed to free trade,” SACC general secretary Eddie Makue said.
”The restrictions announced by government are consistent with the principles articulated by the global campaign for trade justice,” Makue said in a statement.
Reverend Malcom Damon, the director of the Economic Justice Network, a project of the Fellowship of Christian Councils in Southern Africa, also welcomed the move.
”It is good that government is not just considering the interests of retailers, but is also responding to the urgent need to protect domestic industries and provide jobs for South African families,” Damon said.
Also on Thursday, the SACP in a statement said thousands of jobs had been lost in this sector because of unregulated imports from China and other countries.
”It is our view that the import of clothing in our country has always been done at the expense of our own domestic clothing industry.
”As the SACP, we call on the bosses of the clothing industry in our country to stop their attitude of wanting to sacrifice our own industry and jobs by importing more than 60% of their products from foreign countries.
”The regulations or quotas as proposed by government will go a long way to protecting existing jobs and creating new ones, as well as improve this industry,” said SACP spokesperson Malesela Maleka.
The SACP supported the government’s warning to clothing and textile industry bosses not to abuse the regulations and further exploit consumers.
”The SA Communist Party also wishes to strongly condemn the attitude of major retailers towards this deal. This goes to show the extent to which clothing retail bosses are only concerned about their mega-profits, and not the broader developmental goals of our country,” he said.
This week retailers and major South African trade union federations differed sharply on the deal between the Chinese and the South African government.
Edcon, Truworths, Foschini, Pepkor, Mr Price and Woolworths said the agreement would impact badly on consumers and lead to corruption and loss of income for retailers.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions, the National Congress of Trade Unions (Nactu) and the Federation of Unions of SA (Fedusa) disagreed.
”As trade unionists and South Africans we believe that the job losses in the sector constitute a national tragedy … The terms of the voluntary export restraints introduced by China can save huge numbers of local jobs and create much-needed
new employment,” the federations said in a joint statement.
Cosatu, Nactu and Fedusa, which jointly have a membership of more than 2,5-million workers, said 67 000 jobs had been lost in the clothing, textile and footwear sector over the past four years. – Sapa