Mapeto DWS, formerly known as David Whitehead and Sons Limited, the biggest textile making manufacturer in the country, last week laid off 300 of its employees due to what it says is a difficult economic situation.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s General Manager, Martin Mpata, confirmed in an exclusive interview with The Daily Times <\/em>that the company has been trying to maintain its human resource despite the economic challenge with the hope that things would finally register a turn-around, but the situation reached a level where retrenchment was the only best solution.<\/p>\n Mpata said most of the employees, who have been laid off, are from the manufacturing, crop purchases and support department in the Manufacturing Department and that once the company gets back on track, the retrenched employees will be considered for re-employment.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are some of the measures we have taken to survive because we don\u2019t have overage to pay people when they produce and we can\u2019t sell,\u201d he said<\/p>\n Mpata attributed the company\u2019s move to smuggling which he said has affected the country\u2019s textile business and other sectors and asked government to arrest the situation before it is too late.<\/p>\n \u201cIf only they can contain the smuggling, it\u2019s not only the textiles but other manufacturing companies that are affected by this. For a country to grow, they need a manufacturing base and they must be protected because, if the manufacturing base is weakened by allowing people to smuggle, what it means is everyone will resort to buying from the smugglers since they are cheap and the government will not have money,\u201d he explained<\/p>\n Commenting on the development, Minister of Trade and Industry, Joseph Mwanamvekha, described the development as regrettable and said his ministry is aware of the increase in smuggling and that his ministry\u2019s staff is on the ground to tighten security in all the borders.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have been talking with them and very soon we will sit down again and see how we can come in to assist, but the issue of labour, although it is not my area of jurisdiction, I hope the company has followed the right measures because 300 people is huge and you cannot just retrench such a large number of employees without consulting with the Ministry of Labour,\u201d said Mwanamvekha<\/p>\n He said the company has moved from implementing the three-shift, 24-hour per day and six-days a week shifts to a 12-hour per day and five days per week shift as one way of surviving and minimizing overhead costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mapeto DWS, formerly known as David Whitehead and Sons Limited, the biggest textile making manufacturer in the country, last week laid off 300 of its employees due to what it says is a difficult economic situation. The company\u2019s General Manager, Martin Mpata, confirmed in an exclusive interview with The Daily Times that the company has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":18532,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18528"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18534,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18528\/revisions\/18534"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}