Unjust Manufacturing: Industrial Workers’ Struggle against Exploitation in Ethiopia

Ethiopia, emulating the developmental state model of East Asian states, attracted labor-intensive manufacturing industries to create job opportunities for its young people by providing a class of "cheapened laborers" for global production. Many young rural girls and university graduates work for foreign companies that have relocated their factories to Ethiopian industrial parks. Drawing on fieldwork in two foreign garment companies in the Bole Lemi Industrial Park (BLIP) in Addis Ababa, this paper illuminates how the government's policy of attracting companies with cheapened factory workers' wages exploits local workers and extracts unpaid surplus labor from them. In this context, various subtle forms of workers' resistance on the shop floor are emerging that counter foreign management's labor control practices intended to produce disciplined industrial workers.