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Angry workers spurn Ethiopia’s ‘industrial revolution’
HAWASSA, Ethiopia, Feb 4, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – Zemen Zerihun thought he’d left
farming behind and found the ticket to a better life when he began a job
cutting fabric for a clothing company at a massive industrial park in
southern Ethiopia.
But the 22-year-old ended up quitting within months, weary of working eight
hours a day, six days a week and still not making ends meet earning $35 a
month.
Managers were so strict they would go into bathrooms and yank out workers
deemed to be taking too long, he said.
His supervisor would loudly berate him as “slow” and “lazy” when he failed
to keep pace on the production line, he told AFP.
“After I joined the company, I suffered,” he said. “The supervisors treat
you like animals.”
Experiences like his highlight a major challenge facing Ethiopia’s push to
embrace industrialisation and become less dependant on agriculture.
By attracting foreign investors through cheap labour, it wants to follow the
model of China and other Asian nations in creating a robust manufacturing
sector that can offer badly needed jobs for its young workforce.
But despite high unemployment, young Ethiopians are not going along with
it, preferring to quit rather than stay in jobs where they feel underpaid and
disrespected.
Thousands of employees have already walked out of the country’s new and
burgeoning network of industrial parks.
At the Hawassa Industrial Park, where Zemen worked, staff turnover in 2017-
18 “hovered around 100 percent,” according to a May 2019 report from the
Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University.
The added recruitment and training costs are a main reason why, in the eyes
of manufacturers, Ethiopian labour has “turned out to be considerably more
costly than the government had initially advertised,” the report said.
Government officials say they are taking steps to address workers’ concerns
while balancing them with industry representatives’ interests.
But labour organisers argue the measures are too little, too late, leaving
them no choice but to begin unionising the parks — a development Zemen says
is long overdue.
“The government needs to pay attention to what is happening in the
industrial parks,” he said.
“They think they are giving everyone good jobs, but some of the workers,
they are really struggling.”
– A lofty vision –
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sees industrial parks as an important engine of
growth that can help stave off unrest ahead of elections tentatively planned
for August.
Yet the strategy was adopted several years before Abiy came to power, after
the government realised in 2014 that agriculture couldn’t provide enough jobs
for a booming population, said Arkebe Oqubay, an architect of the strategy
and now special adviser to the premier.
Ethiopia is one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies but youth unemployment
remains a major problem.
The World Bank estimates that two million people enter the workforce every
year.
Despite long-running efforts to restructure the economy, officials estimate
that manufacturing still only makes up 10 percent of economic activity.
As they work to ramp up the sector, officials say they have learned the
lessons of places like Bangladesh — where at least 1,134 people were killed
in the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013 — and are committed to avoiding
unsafe and unsustainable working conditions.
The flagship Hawassa park, a campus of 52 factory sheds occupied by
American, European and Asian companies producing garments and textiles,
opened in 2017.
Its roughly 30,000 workers sew fabric into T-shirts, sportswear or other
sought-after items.
By year’s end, some 30 industrial parks will be operating across Ethiopia,
specialising in sectors like machinery production and information and
communications technology, Arkebe said.
Currently 12 parks have been built.
The parks have already yielded dividends, Arkebe said, raising foreign
direct investment to $4.3 billion in 2017 — a fourfold increase over five
years earlier.
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But wage levels are under the spotlight.
– Attracting investment –
The $26 monthly base pay at Hawassa makes Ethiopian garment workers the
lowest paid in the world, the NYU Stern Center report said.
Though the amount is not uncommon for entry-level employees in a country
with no minimum wage, workers say it barely covers food, transport and rent.
Even those leasing cramped apartments with three or four co-workers and
sleeping in shifts on shared mattresses say they don’t make a decent living.
Eight months after resigning, Zemen is living with his family and still
looking for a new job, but he has no regrets.
He’d rather grow food for himself on the family farm than toil at the
factory which he’d initially seen as his escape, he said.
He is far from the only worker to have quickly grown disillusioned when the
reality of factory life failed to match his expectations.
Tony Kao, deputy general manager of JP Textile, said Hawassa workers faced
challenges switching from agricultural to industrial work.
“It took some time for them just to learn industrial work. They now have to
be on time to work and now they have to learn new skills, they have to learn
how to operate the machines which is a whole new chapter for them,” he said.
Medihant Fehene left her Hawassa factory job, too.
“I’d have to wake up to catch the bus at 5:30 to start work at 6:00, or if
I took the afternoon shift I would not get home until 11:30, when it’s dark
and not safe for a woman to be outside,” she said.
Among measures the government is exploring to address such frustrations is
giving companies land for dormitories for workers to rent at subsidised
rates, Arkebe said.
However, he also defended low wages, saying they help ensure firms invest
in Ethiopia rather than countries where manufacturing is more established.
“If wages are high and investment doesn’t come, new employment is not going
to be created,” Arkebe said.
“The livelihood of workers can improve when their productivity improves,”
Arkebe added, comparing the process to the “industrial revolution” in Britain
and the United States.
– ‘It’s the future’ –
Such statements play well with industry representatives.
“Ethiopia is the garment future. Everybody’s looking at Ethiopia now,” said
Raghavendra Pattar, head of Nasa Garment Plc in Hawassa.
Ethiopian workers have had the right to organise since the 1960s, but
Pattar said he saw no need for unions to be established at the industrial
park.
But Ayalew Ahmed, vice president of the Confederation of Ethiopian Trade
Unions, told AFP that the first “task forces” to begin organising workers
would form early this year.
“If the employers volunteer to have trade unions in the company, that will
be OK. Otherwise we will establish them outside the company,” he said.
The government backs workers’ right to organise, provided it is not too
disruptive, Eyob Tekalign Tolina, a state minister of finance and one of
Abiy’s top economic advisers, said.
Factory owners at Hawassa meanwhile seem to face no shortage of potential
replacements for those who quit.
On a recent morning, dozens of applicants waited in line to be tested on
tasks such as threading needles or placing nails on a pegboard.
Inside the park, 22-year-old Tekle Baraso Bonsa took a break from dyeing
yarn to explain how he was using his $33 a month wage to put himself through
university.
“If I weren’t doing this,” he said, “I’d be shining shoes.”
BSS/AFP/AU/08:40 hrs