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ABSTRACT
Tens of thousands of young Ethiopian women have migrated from small towns and rural areas to work in the Hawassa Industrial Park (HIP), where working conditions and wages are far below their expectations. Low wages and a high cost of living mean that workers face severe challenges in meeting their basic needs for food and shelter that are necessary for reproducing their own labor. Attention to struggles over the reproduction of migrant women’s labor at the HIP generates insights into the practices of the Ethiopian developmental state. The developmental state actively makes and reproduces cheap labor to attract international capital and support economic growth. The state protects international textile manufacturers from the burden of reproducing the labor that manufacturers rely on for profits. The case of the HIP is a necessary complement to recent scholarship on urban Africa that has focused overwhelmingly on the informal economy. The precarious nature of factory work leads some young women to search out stability with small scale, often informal, entrepreneurial work, a process that disrupts conventional narratives of economic development. The complex relationship between wage labor and self-employment suggests possibilities for pro-poor policies that go beyond reproducing labor for international manufacturers.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank all of the former and current industrial park workers who shared their very limited time and spoke to us about their lives. Thanks to Andreas Admasie and Miriam Driessen for commenting on early drafts of this paper. We are grateful for the numerous colleagues who provided thoughts and suggestions for further reading as we grappled with how to frame the experience of industrialization in Ethiopia. We greatly appreciate the helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers and the editors of JEAS.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Barrett and Baumann-Pauly, Made in Ethiopia.
2 Oqubay, Made in Africa; Sun, The Next Factory.
3 Oqubay, Made in Africa, 10.
4 Interview, Former HIP line worker, Hawassa, 05 January 2018
5 Clapham, “The Ethiopian Developmental State”; Demissie, “Situated Neoliberalism.”
6 Terrefe, “Urban Layers of Political Rupture”; Gebresenbet and Kamski, “The Paradox of the Ethiopian Developmental State.”
7 Barchiesi, “Precarious Liberation”; Ferguson and Li, “Beyond the ‘Proper Job’”; Meagher, “Informal Economies and Urban Governance”; Thieme, “The Hustle Economy.”
8 Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish, 11.
9 Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish; Ferguson, “Proletarian Politics Today.”
10 Ferguson and Li, “Beyond the ‘Proper Job’.”
11 Marx, Capital, 275.
12 Magubane, The Political Economy of Race; Moodie, Going for Gold; Wolpe, “Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power.”
13 Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths.
14 Mills, “Gender and Inequality.”
15 Bjeren, Migration to Shashamene.
16 It is not clear why migration to the Middle East did not figure into the aspirations of young women at the HIP. Generally the zones from which HIP workers came are not major senders of domestic workers to the Middle East.
17 Schewel, “Ziway or Dubai.”
18 Schewel, “Moved by Modernity.”
19 Lynch, Juki “Girls, Good Girls”; Mills, “Gendered Morality Tales.”
20 Fernandez, “Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers”; Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas, “Depletion.”
21 Interview, Regional Government Representatives, Hawassa 13 July 2016
22 World Bank, “The World Bank in Ethiopia.”
23 Mains, Under Construction.
24 Oqubay, Made in Africa.
25 Sun, The Next Factory of the World.
26 Hauge, “Should the African Lion Learn.”
27 Hauge, “Should the African Lion Learn”; Staritz and Whitfield, “Made in Ethiopia.”
28 Admasie, “Amid Political Recalibrations.”
29 Schaefer and Oya, “Employment Patterns and Conditions.”
30 Schaefer and Oya, “Employment Patterns and Conditions”; Hardy and Hauge, “Labour Challenges.”
31 Schaefer and Oya, “Employment Patterns and Conditions.”
32 Admasie, “Amid Political Recalibrations.”
33 Aalen, Kotsadam, and Villanger, “Family Law Reform.”
34 Matfess, “Rwanda and Ethiopia.”
35 Amsden, Asia’s Next Giant; Sequino, “How Economies Grow.”
36 Amsden, The Rise of ‘The Rest’.
37 In South Korea restrictions were placed on FDI to force partnerships with local firms that would facilitate technology transfers (Amsden, The Rise of the Rest). In the current environment global competition for FDI combined with WTO prohibitions on these types of restrictions make it very difficult for countries like Ethiopia to follow the South Korean model and force international firms to make the long-term investments necessary to support transfers of technology and increased productivity (Hauge, “Should the African Lion Learn”).
38 Interview, Ethiopian Investment Commission Representative, Hawassa, 14 June 2018
39 Admasie, Dynamics of Assertive Labour Movementism.
40 Barrett and Baumann-Pauly, Made in Ethiopia, 13.
41 Hardy and Hauge, “Labour Challenges.”
42 Ibid., 734.
43 Nathan and Fratkin, “The Lives of Street Women.”
44 Ibid.
45 de Regt and Mihret, “Agency in Constrained Circumstances”; Fernandez, Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers; Schewel, “Moved by Modernity.”
46 Focus Group Discussion, HIP Workers, Hawassa, 20 May 2018
47 Interview, HIP Worker, Hawassa, 30 January 2018
48 Interview, Former HIP Worker, Hawassa, 20 July 2019
49 Interview, Ethiopian Investment Commission Representative, Hawassa, 14 June 2018.
50 Interview, Ethiopian Investment Commission Representative, Hawassa, 14 June 2018.
51 Interview, Gurage Zone Official, Welkite, 12 July 2019.
52 Interview, Former HIP Worker, Hawassa, 07 August 2019.
53 Adunbi, “(Re)inventing Development.”
54 Wages at the HIP are extremely low compared to similar opportunities elsewhere in the country. Internationally owned flower farms in Ziway, 110 kilometers north of Hawassa, also attract young rural women to work for slightly higher wages. In Ziway the cost of living is significantly lower than in Hawassa, but around 85% of worker income still goes towards basic expenses (Schewel, “Ziway or Dubai,” 9).
55 The majority of women were fluent in Amharic as a second language. Others occasionally relied on each other as translators.
56 Focus Group Discussion, HIP Workers, Hawassa, 20 May 2018.
57 Focus Group Discussion, HIP Workers, Hawassa, 20 May 2018.
58 Interview, Former HIP Worker, Welkite, 12 July 2019.
59 Focus Group Discussion, HIP Workers, Hawassa, 20 May 2018.
60 Focus Group Discussion, HIP Workers, Hawassa, 20 May 2018.
61 Interview, Rental House Owner, Hawassa, 12 June 2018.
62 Focus Group Discussion, HIP Workers, Hawassa, 20 May 2018.
63 Interview, HIP Worker, Hawassa, 12 June 2019.
64 Interview, Former HIP Worker, Welkite, 12 July 2019.
65 Hardy and Hauge, “Labour Challenges.”
66 Interview, Former HIP Worker, Hawassa, 12 June 2018.
67 Interview, Former HIP Worker, Hawassa, 05 January 2018.
68 Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish; Ferguson, “Proletarian Politics Today.”
69 Admasie, “Cycles of Mobilisation.”