Textile companies job layoffs to cross one million

Textile cos to axe five lakh employees in next five months
Financial Express - 21 Nov 2008
Even as the government is getting ready to undertake a nationwide survey of over 800 companies to find out the exact job losses in India due to the global financial crisis, the first report of pink slips is out. .....

Five lakhs is a large number. Compare this with a few thousand job cuts announced by the IT industry. However the average salary of the textile employees is probably much less than that of the IT people hence the five lakh number is definitely bad but does not immediately translate into a 50 times worse scenario than IT job cuts. Also note that this is probably not much due to decrease in domestic demand but a slow down in exports. Countries like India and Bangladesh export are one of the leading textile exporters to the west.

He [deputy chairman, Confederation of Indian Textiles Industry] said the textiles and clothing industry employs 35 million workers directly, adding that already 7 lakh jobs are estimated to have been lost and another 5 lakh would lose jobs by March 2009.