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The alarming rise in retrenchment due to the closing of firms and the resultant escalation in
unemployment and the manipulation of labour (Skinner and Valodia, 2002) in the clothing
industry has seen an increase in previously employed workers in this sector joining the
informal economy and using their skills and contacts to survive these adversarial impacts of
global competition. This perspective is endorsed by Rogerson (2000:693):
It is clear that the recent growth of informal production is inextricably
linked to the downturn in the formal clothing economy, as thousands of
retrenched factory workers have set up their own small clothing
enterprise.
Assessing the numbers that flow from the formal sector into the informal sector is made
even more difficult, due to the reluctance of informal clothing business-owners to register
their business as they wish to “evade and elude certain government requirements” such as
labour regulation and tax (Ince, 2003:6). This reluctance can be contributed to the
dependency of these enterprises on the largely erratic availability of orders emanating
from retailers; this results in an unstable stream of income for such businesses, and little or
no guarantee of the means to pay their staff the legal benefits to which they would legally
be entitled in accordance to the South African labour regulations (Williams and Hanival,
1999:74).
The SA Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (SACTWU) has plans to offer individual industrial
home-workers a range of benefits, such as “access to health care and retirement funding,
followed by a range of other services, including training”. SACTWU’s approach is that, by
having registered informal manufacturers as union members, it would provide a mandate
for union leadership to “pressurise formal clothing manufacturers and retailers to sub-
contract work only to those informal producers who are on the register and in this way
SACTWU could start to shift work away from anonymous individuals in the informal
economy to known individuals in the informal economy” (Bennett, 2003:22; Goldman,
2003).
Contributing to the increase of sub-contracting or casualisation of labour by the clothing
industry has been the influence of organisations like the Confederation of Employers of
South Africa (COFESA), which allowed the industry to casualise their staff, resulted in the
rapid growth of informal sector enterprises found in Chatsworth, Phoenix and Verulam. This
evolved in response to the opportunity presented to formal manufacturing firms by such
bodies to bypass the labour laws (Skinner and Valodia, 2004:515). Amendments to the
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