Labor Governance and Agency in the Global South: Examining Labor Regimes in Ethiopian Industrial Parks

Wogene Berhanu Mena
: Vienna University of Economics and Business, Department of Management, Institute of Gender and Diversity in Organizations, Austria

Abstract

The rising production cost in the Global North and the race to the bottom in the Global South have caused the relocation of labor-intensive industries to the latter. Among the new emerging destinations, Sub-Saharan African countries such as Ethiopia have been striving to become industrial hubs. Among the sectors, the textile and garment industries are at the forefront. The low labor cost is the major pull factor in attracting investors from their preferable location in Southeast Asia. The emphasis on the low wage, however, overlooks factors such as the necessity of time in the global supply chain. The timely delivery, needed from the buyers, pushes the producers to look for a production environment with very low supply chain disruption. Among other factors, supply chain disruption is often caused by the workers’ individual and collective actions in the forms of resistance and bargaining. To reduce the possible supply chain disruption, the sellers consider various labor control mechanisms and opportunities in a given country in order to limit the workers organizations and mobilizations. This study contributes by examining the labor control regimes in the Ethiopian Industrial Parks by taking the case of the Hawasa Industrial Park, one of the largest in the country. To do so, forty semi-structured interviews are conducted with workers, trade union leaders, Human Resources Managers, and government officials. The collected data are analyzed thematically. The findings of the study indicate that the combination of state, market, and employers labor control regimes have been used in the Industrial Park to reduce the disruption in the supply chain at possible low cost. The labor control regimes by the state and the employers have faced overt and covert forms of resistance by the workers, which shape and shaped by the labor control regimes. Thus, the labor governance and labor agency are interrelated and shape the labor regime, which is embedded under the global supply chain.

Presentation