GTP Sends 690 Workers Home

All the 690 workers of TexStyles Ghana Limited, formerly called Ghana Textile Printing (GTP) Company, producers of high quality wax prints, were sent home on Friday following the temporary closure of the factory by its management.

The management has explained that the closure became necessary because it could not sell its products due to the flooding of the market with cheap Chinese textiles smuggled into the country.

The managing director, Gillas Moisan, told the paper on Friday that the workers were being sent home for six weeks and in accordance with the country's labour laws, they would be paid their full salary while at home.

“We hope that the situation will improve soon to enable us to sell more stocks then we can resume full operation,” he said.

Mr Moisan indicated that if the situation got out of hand, “there will be no alternative than to file for redundancy.” He said the Chinese products are destroying a lot of their business because unlike previous times when the company could sell a lot of stocks during festive periods like Christmas and Easter, “the story is different now.”

The company has at present over two million yards of wax prints and other products in stock that it has not been able to sell for almost seven months. He explained that under normal circumstances, that would have taken only about a month or a month-and-a-half to sell.

He said that if government reduced tariffs generally, the cost of production would reduce and that would subsequently reflect in the cost of locally manufactured textiles and enable more people to patronise them.