Posted on 10/17/2025 8:59:28 AM PDT by marcusmaximus
TIRUPPUR, India — If the tag on your T-shirt says “Made in India,” there’s a good chance it came from this southern industrial hub — long known as “Dollar City” for its dominance in the U.S. market.
Now, just seven weeks after the Trump administration imposed a 50 percent tariff on Indian exports, many of Tiruppur’s garment factories have ground to a halt. The slowdown has rippled through a vast network of hulking plants and small workshops, which employ more than 600,000 people. Thousands of fabric cutters, thread trimmers and sewing machine operators are suddenly out of work.
“Production has fallen by 25 percent across the board,” said G. Sampath, general secretary of the Center of Indian Trade Unions in Tiruppur. This city’s garment exports were valued at $3.7 billion last year, according to the Tiruppur Exporters’ Association, and a third of the apparel manufactured here is normally shipped to American retailers, including Walmart, Target and Sears.
Interviews with more than a dozen factory workers, labor contractors and business executives revealed how rapidly President Donald Trump’s trade war has upended lives and livelihoods across Tiruppur, a one-industry town where many workers have no written contracts or job security. Migrant laborers from rural villages have been sent home. Those still employed on the production lines said their hours and wages have been slashed. Exporters faced with frozen or canceled orders are focused on shipping out existing inventory, fearing new stock will go unsold; some said U.S. buyers have begun demanding discounts of up to 20 percent to offset the cost of tariffs.
Manohar Sahni, 44, spent the past two years here trimming loose threads from freshly stitched garments.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
ZFG. We don’t exist to make the a cesspool of a country wealthy. It’s time other countries learn this.
The damage they’ve done to American people is humongous.
Troll
I was given employment advice that best protection is niche skills to avoid AI obsolescence...
1ScrappyArmyMom Uninformed true believer...
Agreed. Or perhaps another way to say it regarding niche skills, be a programmer who gets into the business logic and needs of his functional users. I lost my first software job after a year because my boss kept having to explain to me the health insurance industry’s needs from the software. Never again. From then on I’ve always made a point to learn the business and the industry of whatever software job I was in so I could provide practical service to my functional users.
And you wonder what happened to garment manufacturers across America. Not.
From the 1990s to 2005 the U.S. lost over 700,000 textile and garment manufacturing jobs to offshoring. Thank you Bush-Clinton-Bush duopoly.
I give less than a damn about India’s economy.
I find it funny that countries that have been tariffing us since the beginning of time now squeal like stuck pigs when it comes back to them.
We once had our own textile industry. It’s pretty much gone now.
While driving industry back to the US without addressing the factors that drove it away in the first place will decrease the overall amount of wealth created, where that wealth is created and whom it enriches matters.
Destroying the Indian garment industry is not a good thing per se, but if the savings lost by US consumers is not greater than the local wealth created by having the garment industry in country, it is a net win for us. Further, enriching other countries has cultural and security ramifications as they become able to buy influence in our country to further tilt the scales in their favor. Finally, having our own leverage over another country allows us to advance policy advantageous to Americans.
No action occurs in a vacuum and I expect the Indians to react as they are able in the most advantageous way for India. As long as my government is doing the same for me we will eventually find the right balance on trade between our countries. There is a reason economics used to be called “political economics.”
My father in law sold textile manufacturing equipment throughout the US, South America and Asia over the course of his career.
To companies like Wrangler and Levis to Polartech fleece.
So many of them went out of business or moved overseas.
Even Polartech(in Haverhill, MA) almost went out of business because they copied their patented product and made it in China cheaper.
The only companies left at the end were the fully automated ones like one that made headliner for interior of automobiles.
He has been retired for about twenty years now.
FYI, he said the worst people to sell to were the Indians.
They were not honorable. They were always trying to get something else thrown in even after you had a deal.
On the other hand he loved the Chinese/Taiwanese people.
Then there's my 800 count sheets...luv soooo much...
Guess it’s back to “Look for the union label...”
Very wise. I have learned a niche skill doing Backups, many do not know how to backup and restores...
I bought a compact Cab tractor 6 years ago. I looked at all the major brands: Kubota, John Deere, Massey Ferguson, New Holland, Kiote, Mahindra, Yanmar.
Mahindra was the least expensive for the money.
JD was the most expensive.
Others were all in between.
I ended up buying a Massey Ferguson 37 HP turbo Diesel. Which are assembled in the USA. However, most of the engines of all the tractors were made in Japan or South Korea.
The engine in my tractor is an Iseki. One of the main reasons I bought it was because they had just been bought by Caterpillar. To put in all their skid steers and mini excavators. They are a Japanese engine builder. I figured if that was a good enough engine for Caterpillar, it was good enough for me.
Yanmar builds most of the John Deere smaller diesel engines.
Kubota builds their own.
Mahinda also builds their own engines and tractors all in India. They sell more tractors that any other manufacturer.
So, going forward the price of all these compact tractors are all going to go up because all the major components are made off shore.
Try bamboo sheets. You’ll never go back to cotton sheets again.
😂😂😂😂😂
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