Paper short abstract:

How has industrialization alienated the peasants' labor in Ethiopia? What, if industrialization failed to generate expected employment for the dispossessed peasants? How are they surviving, and what is the source of the living wage after the dispossession?

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses dispossessed peasants' demand for industrial labor and the non-absorption of peasants' labor into industrial production in Bole Lemi industrial park (BLIP) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The scores of peasants who were dispossessed to enable the establishment of BLIP were promised compensatory jobs. Although the park's expansion ensures capital accumulation for companies, it produces a "pile of pain" for the dispossessed peasants. This paper illustrates that the promise of changes in the life of peasants from farm to factory and rural to urban lifestyle did not materialize. This is because the industrial job market is flooded with the influx of young rural girls who moved to the city searching for employment. Rural girls are women migrant workers from different corners of the country, while dispossessed peasants are those who were expropriated from their land. While rural girls migrate to the city for industrial labor, on the contrary, the dispossessed peasants living in Addis Ababa are seasonally "returning to the farm" as daily laborers in rural areas known for their labor shortages. The companies neglected dispossessed peasants' labor because they are illiterate, unskilled, and beyond the productive capitalist age. The peasants become surplus to industrial production due to capitalists' preference to employ young rural girls they consider to be of 'productive age.' As a result, a new precarious peasant class of "three nos"— no land, no work, and no hope—is emerging. The aspiration, hope and expectation of modernity—urban lifestyle, proletarianization and improvement in livelihoods—turned into a reality of unemployment, underemployment, and migration.