President John Agyekum Kufuor, about two months ago launched two special initiatives to address the unemployment problem of the country and produce for export to improve the national economy.
The rural unemployed are being encouraged to go into cassava cultivation for the production of industrial starch for export while their urban counterparts are to go into the garment and textiles production under the African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) of the United States.
AGOA provides some African countries including Ghana with liberal access to the United States markets. The Act offers tangible incentives for Africans to continue their efforts to open their economies and build free markets.The initiative is predicated on the conviction that looking at the Asian Tigers, they all started with garments and textiles and that carried them to the portals of industrialisation because they devoted themselves to producing for the export market.
To follow the path of the Tigers there is the need to establish factories that could produce for export.GT factories as they exist in Ghana now have no hope of producing enough for export, because they are not competitive on the international markets.
Apart from that, they cannot contribute to increase the youth employment situation, which the economy is yearning for, looking at some of the obsolete machines at some of the seven factories in the country.
The country needs GT factories that could produce up to one million shirts for export. That is why there is the need for garments and textile factory investors to relocate at the Export Processing Zones (EPZ) that have already been established at Kpone, near Tema and Takoradi in the Western Region, where facilities have been put in place for investors to fix their equipment and start work immediately on their arrival in Ghana.
It is envisaged that GT investors in China, Asia and Europe would be prepared to relocate in Ghana to produce for export. If this should happen then there would be increased employment of the youth. For example, if 10 of such factories relocate at the EPZ and each employed 1,000 workers, a total of 10,000 people would have jobs and since 70 per cent of their produce would be for export, they could earn enough foreign exchange for Ghana.
However, if the dream of getting GT factories to relocate in Ghana was to become a reality, then there is the need to resolve the industrial disputes between Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) and Textile, Garment and Leather Employers Union (TEGLU) which started seven years ago.
President Kufuor, having seen the danger posed by the dispute, called the protagonists to the Castle, Osu and initiated moves to resolve it.
A special Joint Task Force on ICU and TEGLU has been constituted under the chairmanship of Mr Alan Kyerematen, Ambassador-Designate to the U.S to bring together the leadership of the two unions to work out modalities for their consolidation and also to develop a joint approach to support the PSI in respect of labour issues.
One of the concrete steps agreed on by the Joint Task Force, to give practical demonstration to the process of working together as two unions, is an orientation seminar, which brought together Local Union and Branch Executives in all the major textile and garments factories of the two unions in Tema.At the seminar, Mr Kyerematen emphasised the need for the two unions to promote peaceful atmosphere at the labour front and said that was why President Kufuor got involved to bring the leadership of the two unions together.
After three weeks of intensive discussions with the leadership of the two unions, there has been a commitment to total peace in the GT industry in Ghana.
The joint task force has promoted togetherness to help move GT forward as an industry that could create employment and increase the country's foreign exchange earningsMr Kyerematen said when peace prevails between the two unions, it would send good signals to investors to come to Ghana and with good response the country would generate enormous export revenue within the next two to four years to transform the Ghanaian economy.
He said the leaders need the support of the local and branch executives to join hands with them, because they need to carrytheir members along.
"You should, therefore, not think about the past on this particular issue, else we couldn't move forward. Whatever has happened or is happening to bring the ICU and TEGLU leadership together is not cosmetic.
Mr Kyerematen said local union executives should be able to get the commitment to embrace the peace process to enable "you bring your workers together, so that good signals will go to the numerous investors to let them relocate in Ghana.
"One important fact which should not be brushed aside is that, the success to be chalked out of this will not only interest President Kufuor but will guarantee the future of ourselves as workers and our families," he said.
Mr Kofi Asamoah, Deputy Secretary General of Trades Union Congress (TUC) (Operations) in a fraternal message noted that there was mass unemployment in the country, while others in employment were being shown the exit through retrenchment exercises.
However, the success of PSI in AGOA and GT would create more jobs for the jobless and this could only happen in the case of GT, when ICU and TEGLU allowed peace to prevail, since this would send the green light to investors to come to establish garment and textile industries in Ghana.
The workers during an open forum agreed with the Task Force that any GT factory they would visit, the two leaders - Napoleon Kpoh and Abraham Koomson should go together to address workers' durbars and should also organise joint training programmes to educate workers.
The two unions in all cases would negotiate together in GT factories with the management.
They were happy to hear that one such visit to the Ghana TextilesManufacturing Company (GTMC) recently, saw the two leaders, addressing the workers to their admiration
Contributions from the participants called on members not to take entrenched positions.
