Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I explore the entanglement of rural migrant workers’ expectations and aspirations about better opportunities with the realities of precarious working life in urban Ethiopia.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, Ethiopia has become Africa’s most attractive destination for labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing industries for several companies from economically emerging countries interested in searching for “cheap labor” for their labor-intensive industries. The expansion of industrial parks across the country’s major cities drew a large number of labor migrant youths from rural villages to the cities in search of industrial work. The majority of these first-generation industrial labor migrants are young women seeking work, independence, and a better urban life. Drawing on fieldwork in two foreign garment companies in Bole Lemi Industrial Park (BLIP) in Addis Ababa, this paper examines how the factories’ demand to employ young laborers has fed the motivations and aspirations of scores of young rural labor migrants to work in the industrial park and how their expectations entangled with everyday precarious working life. Young rural migrants associate labor migration with escaping rural poverty and realizing their future life goals. They imagined the city as a source of opportunity for a better future. However, the migrant workers’ expectations—better city life vis-à-vis realities of factory work— the global industrial work ethic and discipline have become the new challenges. For instance, factory workers have meager wages, which are no longer adequate to sustain their lives. As a result, workers turn to other strategies to cope with such forms of life, such as living in new types of arrangements (e.g., cohabitation) and sex work.