California Apparel News

A 42-hour countrywide curfew imposed after deposed President Manuel Zelaya was secretly ushered back into Honduras on Sept. 21 forced factories in the country’s apparel hub to send workers home and shut down operations for one day before resuming partial production a day later.

“It’s a little bit rough right now,” said David Gren, co-owner of Rio Garment, a T-shirt factory in San Pedro Sula, the epicenter of the country’s apparel production.

Gren was stuck in Guatemala on Sept. 23, unable to fly from New York to Honduras because the airport in Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa, was closed.

Making the most of his time, Gren decided to visit some Guatemalan fabric suppliers and reschedule a meeting with a client who originally was to fly to Honduras to view Rio Garment’s fabric offerings. Instead, the client was meeting Gren in Guatemala. “I’m getting really creative,” Gren said with a touch of humor.

Rio Garment executives, whose U.S. clients include Aeacute;ropostale, sent their workers home at 4 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 21, when the curfew took effect. The curfew was temporarily lifted at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 23, with some workers returning to work and others rushing out to buy groceries before the curfew went back into effect at 5 that evening.

Rio Garment executives managed to get special passes for their eight buses, which transport some of their 1,500 workers to their factory, enabling the company to reopen on a partial basis by Wednesday, Sept. 23.

“Today, Wednesday, we are operating at 40 percent capacity, and by Thursday, we should be up to 90 percent,” Gren said.

The same bus-pass system was working for Grupo Lovable, a major apparel exporter and one of the largest apparel employers in the country, with 4,500 workers.

Jesus Canahuati, Lovable’s general manager, said the company’s five factories were shuttered on Tuesday, Sept. 22, and up and running at 20 percent capacity a day later. After obtaining special passes to transport workers, Grupo Lovable was expecting operations to return to 70 percent to 80 percent capacity by Thursday.

“We are hoping that by tomorrow [Thursday] we won’t have a curfew during the day,” Canahuati said, noting everyone was hoping the curfew would be limited to evening hours. “If we don’t have a daytime curfew, we’ll be at 100 percent capacity.”

The Honduran government lifted the curfew on Thursday, Sept. 24.

Grupo Lovable executives were counting on employees working overtime to make sure that orders arrived on time, Canahuati said.

At Honduras’ main seaport, Puerto Corteacute;s, which sends goods to Miami, business was getting back to normal as cargo containers were unloaded and loaded, said Daniel Facusseacute;, president of the Honduran Apparel Manufacturing Association. Bad timing

A dent in apparel production comes at a bad time for Honduras, which is the fourth-largest apparel producer to the United States. It is one of the apparel powerhouses in Central America. Fruit of the Loom, VF Corp. and Gildan Activewear are just some of the North American companies that do a huge amount of their T-shirt, sock and underwear production in the country, where the per capita income is $4,400 a year.

The U.S. recession has had a major effect on Honduras, the second-poorest country in Central America. In the last 18 months, Honduras has seen dozens of factories close. At its high point in early 2008, 133,000 people were employed by garment and textile factories. That has declined to 110,000 workers, Facusseacute; said.

For the year ending July 2009, Honduran apparel exports to the United States declined 11.5 percent to $2.3 billion. Several U.S. companies have left Honduras because of cost cutting and the uncertain political climate in the region that began when Daniel Ortega, considered a leftist, was elected Nicaragua’s president.

The political climate didn’t get any better with Zelaya, a rancher elected president in 2006, aligning himself with Venezuela’s leftist president, Hugo Chavez.

“We exited a couple of years ago from Honduras and Nicaragua because of the political unrest,” said Francisco Hoffman, a spokesperson for Perry Ellis International, a menswear and womenswear maker based in Miami.

Gap Inc. in San Francisco has whittled down its T-shirt production in Honduras, relying on only one factory there. “Our production down there is not impacted right now [with the curfew and Zelaya’s return] because we have such a little amount down there, and it won’t be shipped until October,” said Mark D’Sa, senior director of Gap International Sourcing Americas. “Our production migrated from Honduras three years ago to Haiti, the Dominican Republic and part to Nicaragua because we have been on a cost-reduction drive.”

On June 28, Zelaya was rousted out of his presidential palace in the middle of the night and escorted by military officers to Costa Rica in a coup. Roberto Micheletti, president of the National Congress, was sworn in as the interim president.

The coup occurred because opposition leaders were against Zelaya’s attempt to change the Constitution in order to extend his presidential term, which ends in early 2010.

Presidential elections are scheduled for the end of November, and several candidates are running. Micheletti has refused to speak with Zelaya unless he recognizes the constitutionally mandated presidential elections. Zelaya is holed up in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa.

U.S. and Latin American leaders have insisted that Zelaya be returned to his post, to which he was democratically elected.