Hong Kong's long-slumbering textile factories suddenly need workers - lots of them.
Local textile manufacturing, in decline for nearly two decades as businesses migrated across the border in search of cheaper mainland labour, is in resurgence thanks to the re-imposition of import caps on Chinese textile products by the United States and the European Union.
'We want to hire lots of workers,' exclaims a sign adorning the 10-storey Lucky Building in To Kwa Wan, where TAL Apparel places the finishing touches on Brooks Brothers shirts.
TAL human resources executive Lily Kwan said that the factory had hired 25 new workers in the past three months, mostly women over 40 who had done sewing in their youth.
For years, the survival of Hong Kong's textile industry hung on two threads: high-end production for European and Japanese fashion designers and the Outward Processing Arrangement (OPA). The latter enabled manufacturers to use the 'Made in Hong Kong' label on their garments, thereby evading US and European import quotas on mainland Chinese products, provided a portion of the work was completed locally.
After they relocated their core operations to the mainland, virtually all major Hong Kong manufacturers maintained OPA operations in Hong Kong and Macau.
