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Accepted Paper:
Industrial dreams and realities: Exploring labor migrants’ aspiration and gender inequality in Ethiopia’s industrial park
Yonas Amaya
(University of Stavanger)
In recent years, foreign factory plants have been exported to low-wage countries where the capitalists aim to exploit the abundance of "untapped" female labor. However, why do factories prefer feminine bodies? How do gender and inequality intersect in the workplace in foreign companies?
Paper long abstract:
The expansion of industrial parks across the country’s major cities drew a large number of labor migrants 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 women has fed the motivations and aspirations of scores of young rural labor migrants to work in the industrial park. 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 industrial work ethic and discipline have become the new challenges.