Becoming a Worker: Industrialization and Textile Labour in Mekelle

Abstract The chapter discusses the labour dynamics that have been emerging within a rapidly growing textile global value chain in Tigray’s capital city Mekelle since the mid-2010s. In the context of an ambitious industrialization policy urged to sustain export-led economic growth, reduce dependency on agriculture and services, and to address pressing political problems such as rising urban unemployment, the Ethiopian government managed to attract global production networks around newly established industrial poles, primarily geared towards manufacturing. Due to a number of historical, political, and geographical factors, by the mid-2010s Tigray was at the forefront of this development. The rapid consolidation of the textile industry in the area around Mekelle generated a new labour question: the coexistence of labour shortage around the textile industrial hub and a large population seeking employment. Empirically the chapter discusses the stories of young workers and trainees navigating textile work against the contrast between significant expectations about industrialization and wages well below reproduction. Workers enacted a number of practices, including absenteeism, turnover, and tardiness when the incomplete transition to industrial labour forced them to seek reproduction through a combination of scarce and poorly remunerated wage employment, self-employment, and other survival activities at the intersection between the formal and informal economy. While some of them managed to make the most of the opportunities generated by industrialization, many others remained dependent on their household of origin for their social and economic reproduction.