Are India’s apparel exporters going mad?

India's apparel exporters are all going on strike on November 19, their trade association says. No: not the workers: the owners and senior managers.

If true: they're mad. If this is just posturing hot air from a trade association: the trade association's mad. Either way: adolescent gesture politics like this has no place in today's competitive world – and makes observers wonder what world these people think they've working in.

Let's start off on the assumption the gesture – known in India as a hartal – is meant to be taken seriously, as the country's bizarrely misnamed Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) claims. The AEPC claims its members' businesses are being destroyed by high cotton prices, so it wants them all to close for a day, and spend that day lobbying politicians to ban yarn exports, rather than making sure export orders leave on time. Problem is, says the AEPC, all that yarn's going to China and Bangladesh, where it just makes their clothes cheaper

So if you're an American, German or British customer, you're going to be happy to hear your order's missed its shipping date so that your supplier can spend the day persuading politicians to make the clothes you're ordering from China or Bangladesh dearer. That's REALLY going to encourage you to do more business in India, isn't it? And what about the workers? Are they going to be paid for work they're not doing? Because if they are, the factories must be making too much profit. Or are they going to be forced out of work, and deprived of their wages, for a day over a dispute they've not asked for? Because if so: how's that going to look on the next compliance audit?

Hartals were invented by Mahatma Ghandi as a way of publicly protesting against a government whose legitimacy Ghandi denied. They proved a reasonably effective way of putting pressure on a relatively liberal and tolerant colonial regime: get all the merchants in a market to close for a day and you demonstrated solidarity. Few people were inconvenienced, since shoppers bought their food a day earlier or later. But what's a good way in a subsistence economy of attracting publicity for a serious political cause is a thoroughly irrelevant and self-destructive way of fighting a commercial battle against Chinese competitors. Any business following APEC's recommendation is simply telling its customers it's not putting its customers first. Which might make that business feel jolly good about life for a day – but is a dynamite way of getting those customers to shift future orders to China, Vietnam. Bangladesh or Indonesia – all countries where businesses put getting orders delivered ahead of silly demonstrations

Or is APEC serious about this at all? Does it actually realise the danger in what it's recommending and is it just saying "lobby politicians, but don't risk your business?" Well, who knows? Hartals weren't invented as a commercial weapon: they're politician-speak, and the AEPC is a politicians' invention, originally created to handle the doling-out of export quotas. Invoking hartals seems to show (as happens disturbingly often) that AEPC is still living in a world where producers can dictate to customers.

That may well be the world the AEPC still lives in. Anyone with orders in an Indian factory might want to make it clear that any supplier who thinks that's the world India's customers live in isn't going to be a supplier for much longer