The Southern India Mills’ Association, with textile mills in south India as its members, plans to come out with a code of conduct shortly on employment of migrant workers.
The association chairman P. Nataraj has said in a press release that textile mills in Coimbatore, Tirupur, and Dindigul have 30 % to 90 % of their workforce from other States.
The numbers are increasing steadily. However, the mills face challenges in terms of getting the right workers, training, and retaining them. The code of conduct will give broad guidelines on employing migrant workers and is a pro-active measure to make the system successful.
The association proposes to sign an agreement shortly with the British Standard Institute for this.
Further, the placement cell of the association decided to go in for direct recruitment of workers from various States for its member mills.
It had written to many States and the Government of Tripura responded. It came forward to support the association for organising a job fair and recruiting workers.
A job camp was held at Agartala on April 25 and 26 and 4,000 unemployed youth from different parts of Tripura took part.
This included women and the disabled too. Seven textile mills from Tamil Nadu took part and recruited 1,635 workers. Of these, 264 are women.
These candidates will be trained for at least 300 to 400 hours at the mills and when they are employed as apprentices they will be paid the minimum wages prescibed by the Government of Tamil Nadu.

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