Ghanas ICU Urges Govt To Address Textile Piracy Menace

Ghana’s Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) has urged the government to urgently stop the piracy of local textiles and influx of cheap foreign prints in the market to sustain the industry. According to union general secretary Solomon Stephen Ashalley Kotei, piracy is slowly smothering and strangulating the local textile industry.

Criticising the government for being unable to curtail negative foreign influence on the Ghanian textile industry, Kotei urged it to attack piracy with absolute commitment and seriousness without being a spectator.

He was speaking recently at the inauguration ceremony of ICU’s local union at Tex Styles Ghana Limited (TSG), formerly known as Ghana Textile Printing (GTP), in Tema.

Ghanaian markets are over-flooded with cheap, inferior and pirated Chinese textile prints, he was quoted as saying by media reports in Ghana.

As several appeals to the government to step in to save the local textile industry have not been heeded to, a coalition of textile companies will mobilize both their management and workers to demand protection rather than plead, he said.

The majority of textile products in the Ghanaian market are now smuggled and counterfeited and if this continues, the situation would turn worse, TSG managing director Erik Vander Staaij said.

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