Labor Costs Increase Pressure: Sweater Enterprises Change Their Physical Strength With Brains

In the production workshop, more than 100 computerized flat knitting machines are lined up one by one, and they work back and forth continuously. They vomit out a sheet of sweater clothing, while the number of workers who manage these machines is less than 20. This is a scene seen in Zhejiang Lishi Weaving Co., Ltd. No wonder when it comes to this year's "labor shortage", Huang Wei, the head of the company, can be so calm.

In recent years, the shortage of labor and the increasingly rising pay after the Spring Festival have become a problem of many labor-intensive enterprises in Tongxiang. Taking the large number of sweater industry in Tongxiang, the large amount of labor has always been a weakness in the development of sweater enterprises. After the Spring Festival every year, more than 3000 sweater enterprises in Pu Yuan always worry about not enough workers.

How to resolve this phenomenon? Many sweater enterprises have learned from their mistakes and began to transform their production technologies. Instead of traditional labor, high-tech equipment has successfully realized their transformation and upgrading while working smoothly through the labor crisis.

Zhejiang Lishi Weaving Co., Ltd. is a large sweater enterprise in Tongxiang. It mainly provides processing for some sweaters in the local and surrounding areas of PU, and its production capacity is close to 2 million 500 thousand pieces per year. In such a large scale, if the traditional hand-held flat knitting machine is used, the person in charge Huang Wei should say, "there are at least seven hundred or eight hundred people working for 12 hours a day, and we have to make sure that we do not take any leave before we can digest it." In the increasingly tense employment situation, aside from artificial wages, it is hard to recruit enough workers.

Since last year, "Lishi weaving" has invested more than 100 million yuan, and imported more than 200 computerized flat knitting machines from abroad. Now, two production workshops are all computerized flat knitting machines. Huang Wei said that compared with the previous hand-held flat knitting machine, the computerized flat knitting machine not only produced more, but also had a significant decrease in the amount of labor employed, and now there are less than 200 workers, only 1/4 of the original.

After the increase in capacity, enterprises are now trying to approach some foreign trade lists in Shanghai and Jiangsu. "This year, the idea of reinvesting will be bigger." Huang Wei confidently said.
Similarly, at the computerized flat knitting machine workshop in Zhejiang Pure Love Fashion Co., Ltd., the newly purchased 24 computerized flat knitting machines have been put into production, together with the previous 4 units, which have 28 computerized flat knitting machines, and only 5 workers operate these equipments. Compared with these machines, workers are somewhat idle. In the hand-held horizontal knitting machine workshop, 60 hand-held flat knitting machines are "one radish and one pit", one man manages a machine, and the workers are busy with their hands and feet. Even so, the output of a computerized flat knitting machine may be 1/6.

Zhu Dabing, manager of the personnel department of the company, said: "every year after the Spring Festival comes, there will be a shortage of employees. Enterprises are also prepared for the rainy day. They invested about 10000000 yuan a year ago, and imported 24 Taiwan made domestic computerized flat knitting machines to reduce the amount of labor to be mechanized."

It is understood that the annual production of pure woolen sweater in the hundreds of thousands of products, limited by capacity, seventy or eighty of the products have to rely on external processing to complete. With the introduction of advanced equipment, not only the quality of products is more stable, but also the efficiency is greatly improved. This year, the company plans to add 16 more imported computerized flat knitting machines.

In the Pu Yuan sweater industry, many bosses joked: "an imported computerized flat knitting machine is equivalent to a Audi car." This basically means that both prices are almost the same. In the face of the hard work of skilled workers and the pressure brought by the increased cost of labor and labor, these sweater owners prefer not to ride in Audi, but also to replace "physical strength" with "mental power".

From the center of Pu Yuan Town, we learned that so far this year, the whole town has imported 952 computerized flat knitting machines, which is significantly higher than in previous years. The enthusiasm of folk technological transformation has also promoted the upgrading of traditional industries and the adjustment of industrial structure.